One of my friends pointed out that what we really know of the man, despite all the writings and memoirs, is ultimately negligible. Almost all of it is a collection of written words, whose already crippling limitations get filtered through the subjective lenses of equally limited human beings.
We know a bit more about Gurdjieff’s approaches to the acquisition of real Being than we do about the man himself. But just a bit. In the end, what we truly know about the acquisition of Being only comes from two places: the older people who taught us something about this effort, from their own (not Gurdjieff’s) real experiences, and from the experiences — of whatever kind — that we have had ourselves. In this sense, it isn’t the hypothesis of Gurdjieff or the books that one can read about him that matter; it is the tested experience that life brings as it flows into us.
This ought to be a deeply organic, chemical, and psychospiritual process; not an endless series of complicated thoughts that compete with one another both within ourselves and between ourselves and others. The chemistry of Being and the property of its harmonic vibration are paramount; talking has little to do with it.
In this sense perhaps one should say that we ought to talk less and concentrate the force of our Being (which is at the same time both an enormously powerful and surprisingly gentle force) more. The concentration of the force of Being consists of a distillation, not the application of pressure. Yet both inwardly and outwardly, we’re far more accustomed to exerting force through pressure in order to concentrate anything. We pressure ourselves; we pressure each other. We let ideas and thoughts pressure us and we use them on other people to pressure them. “The media” that everyone wails about these days is just one outward example of how this functions. It ’s in us first, before it finds any outward expression.
“We”are the media.
Taking this matter into hand the other evening, it occurred to me that our aim ought to be to begin, always, with the simplest question, the question of how I am. A question experienced through an inward contact with harmonic vibration: through relationship. It’s through this action relationship that we begin to understand Being; not through the hypothesis of relationship. Relationship can never remain a hypothesis; one has to do more than talk about it, one has to live it.
To have relation, to relate, means to return to, to come back from somewhere. Turning towards the past is, in a sense, a form of anti-relationship. The aim of relationship is to return not to the past, but the present. Efforts to return to when Gurdjieff was alive and do things the way he did them are doomed from the beginning. If we truly return, if we remember where we are and what relationship is, we always return to now. Part of the mystery of now is its rejection of hypothesis in favor of fact.
It occurs to me, on writing this, that every hypothesis we develop is already weak. We are weak men and women; as my teacher Henry Brown once said to us, “We’re in this work because we’re weak. A strong person wouldn’t need to work.”
Weak men and women can only develop weak hypotheses. These will not serve us in the search for truth; they are subjective and immediately we fall in love with them, because that’s how we’re built: we love ourselves, we love the way we think things ought to be. We love our own ideas about how things are. Our confirmation bias immediately traps us, and this is where we stay.
Facts have a different influence. If they flow into us clearly, avoiding (and this is a delicate matter indeed) our subjectivity, our associations, the myths and fables we make up about our lives and what their aim is, the taste of life is quite different. It leaves me in a world without Gurdjieff; he isn’t here now, he’s dead. In a certain sense I need to become fully responsible for life as it is and understand Gurdjieff and everything he represents as a single punctuation mark in a vast novel; perhaps the first period at the end of the first sentence of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson.
That particular period looks like this: “.” It marks the point from which measurement of all the rest begins.
Hopefully I have made my point.
May we try to avoid hypotheses today—
warmly,
Lee
Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.
Thanks.
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