Notes From Nov. 10

 

Notes from November 10, 2021

What I want is different than what it is.

This is clear enough, because what I wish for is different than what is. What I wish for isn’t here and hasn’t manifested; it’s an aspiration, it’s of the future. 

So what I wish for can’t be what is now; the very idea is in fact contradictory.

Yet this work, this inner work that I’m attempting, somehow insists that I need to have a wish: that my desire should point me towards the future. This is a peculiar contradiction of the idea Epictetus put in front of us: a man (or woman) who wishes for things to be as they are will always find happiness.

Do I want to find happiness? I can’t find it somewhere else. If it exists, it must exist here, because if it exists elsewhere, I can’t have it. 

I need to find it here, in this moment.

There are more contradictions on the table. It’s my deepest conviction, born from many years of experience, that true happiness, absolute joy, has a core of great sorrow within it. In fact, the two are not different; they combine in order to bring the truth of what they are, and together – and together alone — they bring that perfect blend of joy and sorrow which, in the end, is happiness. This is a product of the higher emotions which we generally refer to as feelings. Why it’s this way, I can't say, other than to say that this is what Mr. Gurdjieff told us our being duty was —to take on a portion of the sorrow of His Endlessness.

This feeling is completely different than what I want; it is, rather, what is wanted, and it isn't wanted by me. It’s wanted by something much greater than myself. It would probably be too grandiose to claim that it’s wanted by the universe itself; and yet it seems to be built into the very fabric of the universe, so how can one argue with that proposition?

So the greatest joy and happiness is to feel something that does not belong to me; that includes everything and sharply focuses both me and my place within it. In this way joy and happiness are not found in me or my desires, but rather in what is not me and not mine. 

This is yet another paradox, because I have this sense of happiness as being something that should belong to me the moment that I think about having it. It should be of me and in me, I think to myself, not a universal property.

The many different ideas and aims about what one should try, how one should be, what one should wish to do that I hear around me from people studying the Gurdjieff ideas is bewildering. It seems complicated and tangled, and is often excessively intellectual. Most of it doesn’t seem to center around the experience, as it does for me, of receiving the sorrow. This is the primary duty and the most important goal in my experience, and yet it apparently remains an abstraction for most folk.

***

I was thinking about the way I think last night. How I do things. It occurred to me that it's commonplace for people to collect their thinking within a form, a form that has many different structured details and logical rules, and live through that. The example I was thinking of last night was music. I don't know how to read music or identify the nature of chords or even, for that matter, tell you what a note is unless I play it on an instrument where there is a context for me to specifically identify it. When it comes to the form of music, I am a complete and absolute ignoramus. 

Yet few would argue the fact that I can play music and write music. I just don't do it using a form. I do it organically.

Most of my thinking is done this way. On the whole, I think organically, not from form. This is why I'm not so great at math and have relatively little patience for it. It turned out when I was in high school that with a sincerely great amount of (very frustrating) effort, I could actually be really good at math, but the amount of effort it took didn’t seem worth what I got from it. It turns out that I’m far more interested in — and capable of — thinking organically, in the end, despite my extensive explorations of form. Nowadays I do nearly everything organically. It arises naturally from who I am and where I am. 

I derive my thought from my being, not my being from my thought.

I suppose one can't deny the great benefit of being built the other way around; without that, we wouldn't have engineers, build things, create technologies, and so on. At least I suppose it's a great benefit; these propensities and abilities, however, are so often used in ways that destroy us and the planet that the question must be asked. 

Are they really benefits?

It seems to me that the world could do, in nearly every case, with a great deal more organic thinking that derives from being, rather than formulatory thinking that attempts to reach being. One could argue that the entire problem with those in the Gurdjieff work who feel like they are at best treading water lies in exactly this difficulty. 

Perhaps we could call it thinking from the heart, rather than thinking from the head. To think organically is to think from the heart. Just to say this brings a taste of the sorrow. Perhaps there is something there I need to contemplate more.

To think organically is to inhabit what I am and be where I am. I am only ever here. I can't be anywhere else because elsewhere lies in a portion of time I don't currently inhabit.

On that note, I would remind myself that I only live in this day. There is no other day. I must make my peace with what is here, not what happened before and not what may happen later. There needs to be an intelligent way of making my peace, and that needs to come from organic thought, not formulated thought. Formulated thought ought to be left to the parts that need it for automatic processes. It can do everything it needs to on its own if I leave it alone and let it function. 

This gives me time to be who I am within myself; and that is exactly what I don't give myself enough time for.

with warm regards,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a regulyar man.

PS. This house is the home I lived in over 60 years ago, from 1957-1962, in Rowayton, Connecticut, before my family moved to Germany. I went back there in November, and it turned out all the houses in the neighborhood were still there in more or less their original form. 

Many vital experiences that formed my impressions of the world took place there. When my sister was born, this is the house she came home to. This is the street where I told my mother, on the day that John Glenn orbited the planet, that I didn't want to grow up to be an astronaut—but just a "regulyar (sic) man."

Because I tend to post childhood pictures as the "sign-off image" for my posts I thought I'd use this one as a bit of a change-up that still has a consistency to it.

Notably, I am the only family member that ever returned here to see the house.

warmly,

Lee