A Devastating Form of Grace

 

Nov. 20

How do we find a work of our own for this time?

I’m beginning this morning with a sense of the core of myself, of the center of my being. There’s always a thread that connects me to this part of myself, this inner residence with its organic nature. Yet it's often the case that I am a bit closer to this in the morning.

So starting from here, I've been considering the fact that we need to reinvent this idea of "work" and what we are, and take responsibility for it not through the books we have read and the words left behind by Gurdjieff and Jean de Salzmann and the like. 

The work is a living thing, an organism, a creature that exists through the energy it generates like any other creature. It must breathe and eat and live in this moment in order to survive. It cannot exist as a scavenger of corpses. Or, rather, it can—but in doing so, it becomes a lower creature, and this is not in its true nature.

So I have to become a cell in this organism, a living element that also eats and breathes and lives in this moment. Trying to exist on the leftovers from past meals is not enough. I need to bring the whole of myself to this meal and this breath, not look backwards to the meals that were eaten yesterday and the air that was present yesterday. It’s the air that is present today that I’m interested in.

I want to become a human being. This isn't so easy; and it's so obvious, isn't it, that what takes place in most of the world today is subhuman, feeding off the corpses of what went before. We live on a planet where society has become a zombie movie, where creatures that are dead to their human nature attack everything around them that isn't infected with their corruption and drag it into the whirlpools of confusion. 

It’s a struggle, a struggle for life itself, to remain whole and human in the midst of this catastrophe. Yet as bad as it seems, it has probably always been like this, because humanity has a proclivity for swallowing the past without paying attention to the way that it deflects us from the present.

There's a need to become responsible, in the sense of in our work in the Gurdjieff practice, for today and what it is, and embody both the work and the practice in the context of today's world and today's responsibility, with as little reference as possible to the past, especially in so far as we idolize it. There is a thin line between reverence and worship; and we want to revere the work, not worship it. To worship it would be to become unquestioning and dogmatic; to let it cool and solidify. It needs to remain warm and liquid, to be quick and not dead.

This work is a devastating form of grace. It cannot be encountered without a willingness to die to what is already known. How ironic then, that we keep referring to what we already know between each other over and over again. 

It's in the spirit that I wake up every day believing with every molecule in my body that this is the only moment that exists. There is no other time to work, and there is no other place. There are no books here in this time and place, just me and my effort and my thought, my feeling and my sensation. I don't carry Beelzebubs Tales to His Grandson around as reference material when I am working at the office or cooking in the kitchen. It's not the Bible. I don't open The Reality of Being for advice when in a discussion with my children. I try instead to open my heart. It has far more material in it, if I only pay attention. 

I try to be here with my molecules in a state of attention that does not make assumptions based on the past. 

I don't know what is going to happen right now; and although the past supports me, it does not truly make me, because only the present moment makes me.

with warm regards,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.