Intuitive thought

 March 18.

We make things too complicated.

Perhaps this is just human nature; perhaps not, I don't know. But I see the tendency in all of us to become deeply involved with complex thought patterns, obsessions, really, that draw us away from the experience of life and the act of breathing in and out here in the body.

Gurdjieff frequently spoke of obsessions, idée fixe, and warned his pupils against developing them. We could take the idea as one of identifications, but it's really more intense than that. It's not so much forgetting ourselves in a single thought, as it is in getting lost in a thicket of them. Complexity comes in the form of bramble patches in the mind; we stumble into it, and it clings to us. The more we struggle, the more difficult it is to escape. 

The mind is entangled in the products of its own ability to produce complex relationship.

There is a good place for complex relationship, but it needs to be held at arm’s length. If we don't remain separate from it, when we sink into it, we're lost.

The attention has a good deal to do with remaining separate, because if it has the least thread of intelligence in it it stands back a bit from the complexity and distinguishes between each thought and Being. It's this distinction between thought and Being that is important. By all means, have all the thoughts you wish to; but Be while you are having them. This means to not forget the body and the breath while you think. Thinking becomes alive in a different way through this practice. 

You see thoughts as they arise.

Ordinary, or as Gurdjieff called it formatory, thinking has about as much intelligence as ants do in it. That is to say, it's programmed to wander around according to a set of associative rules, encounter this, do that, and so on. Very formulaic. The study of ants has shown that the behavior of individual ants is exactly like that. What takes place when many of them work together using these simple rules becomes very complex and displays what is called emergent behavior; a colony of ants behaves much more intelligently than an individual ant, sometimes astonishingly so. 

The pattern of our ordinary thoughts is nearly identical to this. They're relatively stupid and follow automatic programs. Like the search patterns of ants, they're programmed to produce and follow random behaviors designed to yield, over the broad statistical average of their action, meaningful and rewarding results. 

But in human beings, rather than recognizing these individual thoughts for the relatively mechanical creatures they are, we take them as gospel. Each one that pops up has the tendency to convince us that it's what is true at the moment. If it weren't for the moral structures that society imposes on people, taught from outside, this tendency would quickly become disastrous. When it is untethered it produces insanity of one kind or another. In this sense (the sense of undeveloped man) we badly need those automatic patterns instilled by social form.

Men and women have, however, the capacity for a very different kind of thought, which is not formulaic, but connected to much deeper resources within Being. The use of what we call attention, which is not so much a property of the mind but rather a connective tissue between the mind, the body, the breath, and feeling, can bring us into a relationship with that kind of thought. 

We might call this, for the lack of a better term, intuitive thought. 

The word intuit comes from the Latin verb intueri, which is constructed by -in, “upon,” and ”tueri,” to look. Right away, using this expression intuitive thought, we see that it is thought which we see from a distance, that is to say, we are present to the thought as we have it instead of identified with it. 

Here in intuitive thought there arises a whole, not a partial, quality to awareness that recognizes formulaic thought – which, mind you, cannot be eliminated —for what it is. This causes the onlooker, Being itself, to refuse to get drawn into the entanglement of formulaic thought. 

Gurdjieff actually explains this precise feature of Being in the meeting of June 6, 1944:

M. G. : On the one hand you keep the sensation of yourself and on the other hand you drive out associations, you don’t allow them to invade you.

G. M. : To be able to search for them, one needs a kind of image. Is it the sensation and the sense of self?

M. G. : Not of oneself. The sensation and feeling of your presence. The head must continuously control what is being done in me. I sense. On the one hand, all the time, I sense; on the other, my attention does not allow my associations to disturb me. My attention is completely occupied. My head is awake. All the time I do this. My head makes sure I sense, and it hunts associations. She doesn't even have time to represent anything to herself. You understand? … This thing, almost no one can do. Also, everyone should understand my response to our esteemed M. It’s of tremendous value for all those who work to be able to understand this thing. It's a very big thing, difficult. Consciously you're busy with two things: you sense, you control all your presence, and at the same time, you chase the associations. Automatically, without you, your atmosphere is elevated. Everything that’s usually scattered becomes concentrated. You’ll collect yourself and you’ll become yourself.

I think it's safe enough to say that when we are lost in the complexities of our thought, this is impossible. And indeed, he says it's very difficult. Yet if we don't learn to take a step back from the complexity of our thinking and identify it for what it is, we don't have a relationship with thought: we are thought. 

An intimate relationship with feeling and sensation causes us to be 2/3 more than thought. They, in their own right, are also forms of thought, but they don't use words to think. When presence connects their living force to our Being, they add qualities to active, living thought that formulaic associative thought can't express. 

If one wishes to know where our capacity for real love begins, one needs to look here in this area. It's something that needs to be looked at for many years in order for an understanding to begin to arise. 

What is certain is that it will not arise within the thicket of complex thoughts which appear to contain intimations of what direction to go in, but are actually just a forest to get lost in.

Hoping that you find yourself in good relationship today,

warmly,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.