Moles

 

The longer I spend in the Gurdjieff work, the more I realize that it has individuals in it for which the work is entirely unsuited.

There may be a work that suits them, but it is not this one. To think that this work suits everyone would be sheer foolishness.

In particular there are individuals in the work who harbor a secret hatred for religion — sometimes it’s not so secret – especially Christianity; and there are those who harbor a secret hatred for the work itself. They conceal themselves behind the veil of words which we use to exchange with one another; and of course this is no different than the way people who harbor secret hatreds function in the ordinary world, or even in the mesoteric worlds of other religious practices. 

It's easy enough to learn the form of the words in any work work; and then one can be any way one pleases inside oneself, and look to others like one is part of the community. The only evidence one may occasionally see of their inner aberration is a tendency towards a Machiavellian exercise of power.

There is an imbalance in these people and ultimately there is no point in working with them. You could do it for lifetimes and nothing would result, because they have committed themselves to their hatred, and they believe that a commitment to hatred is actually the most important feature they can have in order to carry their inner work forward. This is in fact a form of insanity; and it’s almost impossible to root out once it establishes itself. It concentrates its intensity so that it can consume more of what the soul needs in order to survive; and eventually this parasitic "work" in a person who undertakes it acts like a vampire that has drained all the spiritual blood from their Being, all the while creating a nearly perfect shell of appearance around them that allows them to stay in a work and continue to appear normal. This takes place because the work they are in is now the place where they feed the darkness that has come to roost in them; and they don't want to leave the restaurant.

One needs to be very careful about such things. Not paranoid, mind you, but perceptive of where a person is in their inner life and what their center of gravity is. The fact remains simple enough: no matter who a person is and no matter where they are, in the work or not in the work, a taxi driver or a president, if there is not a living and tangible core of love in their action towards others, a humility in their assessment of themselves, they are already a danger to themselves and everyone else. And should be treated accordingly.

One of the most frightening lessons to be learned from all of this is that every individual has such an individual in them – a certain part which tries to keep itself secret from all the other parts and which harbors just such hatreds. Part of inner work is to acquire the strength for great vigilance so that one can see this part and its attempts to subvert what is right in one's life and one’s Being. 

With enough inner work, over the course of many decades, the place of existence for this part of Being grows smaller and smaller and it becomes more and more desperate and prone to attempt disruption of one kind or another. The good news about this, if there is any, is that by this time Being has usually acquired enough strength to withstand its assaults.

Anyway, I bring this up because of the last post about opinions. Opinions are, so to speak, of the devil and ought to be treated accordingly. When Mr. Gurdjieff said in meetings that this or that could be “sent to the devil,” whatever it was generally had something to do with one's opinion about things. Cf. opinion; a view or judgment formed about some thing, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge. 

That describes just about everything we usually are.

Think for a moment about how very different we would be inside, if our views and judgment were formed based on love.

Hoping that you find yourself in good relationship today,

warmly,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.