The Birds

 

One of the ideas that one encounters frequently in the book of the Paris group meetings of 1944 is the idea of the idee fix— a French expression that means obsession.

The word is, tellingly, most often used when referring to one’s efforts at inner work. Gurdjieff repeatedly reminds his students that they need to pay good attention to how they practice, lest what they are doing become an obsession. This comes on top of the repeated warnings to never work for more than one third of one’s time.

What are we to make of this?

An inner work is never a work for itself; and it is furthermore never a work “for me.” It’s merely a tool, not a thing unto itself with its own merit. It’s there to help one become more whole, to become a human being; it’s there to help one develop an organic capacity for thinking, sensing, and feeling, in order to insert oneself more deeply and more directly into one’s life. 

Many things can happen from that place, that state; but above all what must develop is a flexibility, and an obsession never has flexibility. On occasion, Gurdjieff recommends to a pupil that they completely stop working and just live in a completely ordinary manner — preferable, one can tell from the way he says it, to the way that pupil is “working” at that particular moment in their lives. There’s a big difference between a work that takes place in life and a life that takes place within work. The first is a flexible organism; the second is a rigid structure.

I had a strange dream last night. Perhaps it has nothing to do with it, but it comes to mind just now. 

In it, I was in the kitchen of a small house in a small town of undefined nature undertaking unknown tasks. I was with several other equally undefined people. For some reason, those in the town had committed transgressions and needed to be punished. A curse was placed by me on a small plastic container; this was a curse of birds. But the birds were just very tiny birds, goldfinches, little birds of great beauty. Once the curse became effective the birds began to fly out of the container endlessly, as though it were thousands or even millions of times larger than its actual size, which was that of about a pint or two. 

They were beautiful; and it was hard to imagine, as they poured out of the box, how they could be construed as a curse of any kind at all. They were a source of wonder. In point of fact, it seemed as though the rebellious townspeople were to be punished through bounty and giving, not through hardship and deprivation.

Perhaps I live in an unknown village where I perceive the inhabitants to be transgressors. Perhaps this is my inner condition. And perhaps my attitudes towards them are mistaken, perhaps I understand very little about them. I don’t even know what they need. I presume; and in my presumption, I curse. If I examine my ordinary outer actions in daily life I see that this is certainly true in many ways in terms of my outward manifestations; and yet my outward manifestations have something to do with my inner condition: I'm staring into a mirror.

In a strange way, then, perhaps the dream is telling me that I can help the village of idiots — that’s the way I see them, they are fools that need to be taught a lesson — through generosity, through the giving of beauty and caring in all of its aspects. This is certainly what the birds seem to represent in the dream, not something awful or threatening, but rather a bestowal of goodness in endless measure.

Goodness, however, isn’t my goodness; it flows into the world out of nowhere, as the birds appear in the box. It appears to my astonishment, and in defiance of everything I know or understand. It flows ceaselessly; and as it flows, creation is realized and released into the air on wings, to spread itself everywhere. 

Each one of the tiny little birds that is created is an extraordinary living creature; so this goodness that began as what was meant to be a curse has transformed itself already, and spreads everywhere. In a sense, in my dream, the curse itself—and my attitude—have become inanimate matter; it represents my reactions, my mechanical nature, my mindlessness. 

Yet in its encounter with an initial bad-hearted impulse, I suddenly discover that divinity intervenes; and divinity has much better intentions for the world than my own. 

It brings not a curse but a blessing; and it brings a blessing with the capacity to spread across all the land.

These are my thoughts this morning.

May we try to release a few birds today—

warmly, 

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.