Love and decency, Part II

My friend Chris Wertenbacker, author of the book “The Enneagram of G. I. Gurdjieff,” remarks that Sigmund Freud maintained the ego is primarily a body–ego. 

That is to say, the ego is a creature of impulse and desire, of the apparently crude (but in fact frighteningly sophisticated) needs of the body for survival and reproduction. I think you can see at once how closely tied that is to the fantasies of power and money. What this means is that we have produced societies that are themselves and slaved by unconscious and animalistic impulses and urges. This turns out to be clear enough from history; it's difficult to imagine a more contradictory situation than watching a collection of creatures who call themselves "conscious,” and even celebrate this supposed capacity as the pinnacle of evolution, proceed to mechanically behave in the most heinous and atrocious ways that can be imagined, where every principle of decency and love for others is continuously violated in a international spectacle of deprivation, cruelty, terror, and murder. 

We are, in a word, so much in love with ourselves and the animal cravings of our bodies that we will kill for it. And we prove it every day.

Decency derives from the Latin verb decere, which gives us "decent" in Latin, meaning to be fit. The word thus begins, at its root, with the inference that what is appropriate will also be healthy; good for others as well as oneself. We can draw a straight line from the idea of decency to Christ's adage, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13.) 

It is doubled down on, compounded, concentrated and expanded by Christ’s other comments in Matthew 22:

“But when the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, “Master, which is the great commandment in the law?” 

Jesus said unto him, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

The law, in other words, rests on decency – on the honorable love and respect for the authority that is higher than us (God) and the honorable love and respect for those around us. Love lies at the heart of these actions; decency rests on this foundation of love, of care for others and care for their welfare under the eyes of God.

Because we're far from God and in a dark corner from which we can see nothing of Him and within which no real sound of His voice reaches us—only faint echoes which we routinely misinterpret — perhaps we can forget about God and commandments and so on—along with the pretensions that we truly understand them— for the time being and just devote our attention to the question of doing the right thing and behaving decently. 

This is of course terribly difficult, because the imagination seizes this question and turns it in to one of the ego, where what is right and what is decent is interpreted to mean getting what one wants for itself. Only the adage of The Golden Rule can directly and uncompromisingly help us to untangle that mess. We can't be decent unless that decency is devoted to care and love for others. It may begin in ourselves; but it begins in our self unselfishly, through an awareness of others and an instinctive sense that we should at least, above all, do no harm to the other.

An acquaintance from Ireland recently sent me Annie Lou Staveley’s Little soliloquy on the Christmas story, which can be found at the following Facebook post from the Gurdjieff society of Virginia. Buried in the evocative allegories of this narrative is the birth of decency, of what it means to be human. 

The birth of Christ represents the birth of everything that is good and decent, of what is human, in us. We are called to help that property called decency be born in us not as a single event, but as an organic attitude that prevails in each situation. To see this birth as having happened once, in the past, isn’t enough; the birth of decency must be brought to every moment. In this sense it mirrors the eternal act of creation; it is timeless and puts a perpetual demand upon us to honor it. As Staveley points out in her essay, this demand is meant to gather all the disparate parts of ourselves around a central principle that recognizes what is good. 

It's utterly pointless to practice any kind of inner discipline or religious inclination without understanding this first. The question ought to be in front of us at all times. It's so important that angels celebrate it and announce it and kings and wise men travel towards it from far away places to honor it and offer up gifts to it.

Of course Staveley’s story embraces the descent of higher energies to this level; and the embodiment of those higher energies, should it take place, leads to the transformation of the ego–consciousness of the body not simply because the impulses of our existing body have been overcome or vanquished, but because we have grown a new body — an “astral” body, the body of Christ. 

Christ personifies the growth of this body for Christians, although many of them may not understand that — but it is a non-denominational body, because the body of God is at the same time the body of humanity and of decency, of what is right, of what ought to be manifested throughout the planet and in every human being on it.

That noted, may we grow into the body of Christ during this Christmas season, with the faith, love, and hope of a new awareness of being and decency.

Warmly,

Lee