Transparency

April 20

I bought a new bike this week, after 23 years. My old bike was still working; but it was showing its age, and despite our long-standing relationship, it seemed as though it were time for a change.

The new bike weighs a lot less; it takes advantage of the extraordinary advances in technology of the last two decades. After all is said and done, when I was getting back from my second 10 mile ride on it yesterday morning, the most essential feature of the bike was this: I didn’t know I had it.

That is to say, the ride became more transparent; the bike seamlessly integrated itself into the action of riding and exercise in such a way that it disappeared. It occurred to me, after making that observation, that a musical instrument is the same way: at a certain point, if the instrument is well designed and integrates into the task well, it disappears. If the editor of the book or the engineer who crafts the sound of a piece of music does their job well, they cease to exist. There is no barrier between the art and the experience of the art. 

The tools are not the point anymore.

Mankind loves its tools; all of our technologies are tools of this kind. We turn them into fetishes, amulets and objects of worship in themselves. Yet the tools, in the end, have almost nothing to do with living: if one took all of them, 100% of them, away, the experience of life would still flow in. And it’s the experience of life that counts. In a very concrete sense, every tool is nothing more than a facilitator for the flowing-in-of-life in one way or another. We presume, of course, that the way tools affect the flowing-in-of-life makes it (we hope) “better” in one way or another; and there's an unspoken premise that dictates that better tools make for better flowing-in-of-life. That isn’t, of course, always necessarily the case; and in fact we have tools such as guns which presume, in a perverse and pathological irony, to make the flowing-in-of-life better by causing the life to flow out of others. How this could be remains unexplained; is death an enhancement of the experience of life? 

That philosophical question will need to be put aside for the moment.

The point that I’m making here is that the flowing-in-of-life is what ultimately matters. When the tool disappears, we see life more clearly. And this is a very important point in regard to our inner work.

I had a friend, a person with many years — let’s say a whole lifetime, for practical purposes — of experience in the Gurdjieff work who spoke to me last week about their struggle with the way that “work ideas,” the form of the work and the thoughts that accompany it, arose immediately and constantly in relationship to everything that was happening in their life. That is to say, life would flow in in this way or that way and then at once a “work idea,” some part of the conceptual form of Gurdjieff’s ideas, would instantly interfere and cause a stream of associations which distracted from the actual fact of life itself. It sought to add to the experience; but it was actually subtracting from it.

This is a true example of the tools attempting to become the experience. I think this happens to us so often that we just take it for granted and begin to live a life of tools rather than a life of experience. 

The phrase that I used yesterday to describe this issue was thus: when we put the tools in place of experience, it does nothing more than give us the skeleton in the museum, which is life with all the life peeled off of it so that it can be put on display as life.

We cannot erect our lives on an armature of thought. Thought is a tool; ideas are tools. We need to come to a moment where the tools become transparent and life is itself, not the tools which are used to make something of it. 

The real question is, why do I need to make anything of life in the first place? Life is already here; it doesn’t need my help to fix it or teach it. It calls on me to participate in it; and if I focus on the tools around me, the things, and the ideas, and make those the chief feature of life, I beggar the question. Life is calling me to be with it as a mother, as a sister and a brother, as a father: it wants me to be part of its family and offer me the richness of its relationship, which is a family not just of human beings, but of atoms, molecular chemistry, and a whole planet of life. 

Yet I seize the ideas that tell me it’s this way and that way; and before you know it, I’m not a human being; I’m a Republican or a Democrat — I have been demoted already into a subhuman category that does not take the fact of my humanity, the feeling and sensation that created, into account.

I bring the political labels into play just to illustrate the lack of transparency that we have towards our humanity. These two examples are perhaps the best that we can bring to bear on the question in this moment, because they are the chief feature in America’s society today. Each one is a delusion created by a set of ideas that demote humanity out of the kingdom of heaven and into the realm of tools. Not just any tools; the tools we seem to prefer are crude ones which we used to better one another.

Transparency can help to overcome this issue. Transparency begins with the focus not on the thought, but on the sensation. If the sensation learns to become the center of gravity, the possibility for a real feeling arrives. And a real feeling always moves one in the direction of one’s humanity, not towards the obsession of the tool user, who flakes chips off a stone core like an idiot, fascinated by the shape and beauty of the spearhead— all the while conveniently forgetting that it will be used to kill.

Well, perhaps this image is a bit too grim to end with; but the contrast is important, because if I am not a human being, it is all too easy for me to become a killer of human beings. We have learned this lesson too many times to count; and yet we keep picking ourselves up and carrying on as though there were no school room.

  Hurrah for using all three parts today. Be well.

Warmly,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.