World: Creation

Christ, from the Tympanum at Abbey Church of St. Foy, Conques

Photograph by the author

A friend of mine recently posted an extensive quote from Ouspensky— accompanied by additional quotes from Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson — regarding Gurdjieff’s observations on the many different ways in which human beings disagree about what the word “world” means.

Following this, I thought I’d undertake an investigation of the word and its meaning, along with my personal observations about it, just to see where it goes.

The word world is a Germanic word composed of two roots, wer,  meaning man, and ald, meaning age.  (Readers interested in monsters will note that a were-wolf thus means, quite literally, a man-wolf.)  Hence the word fundamentally refers to human existence—the life of a man. The applications of the word to other pieces of territory, such as a cosmos, are appendages. Given Gurdjieff’s interest in etymology, he would have known this. 

Linguistically speaking, world does some very heavy lifting, taking up as it does some six full pages in the Oxford English Dictionary. Its primary meanings all relate to human existence, the pursuits and  interests of this present life, the affairs and conditions and life, secular life, and so on. A collection of secondary meanings relate to the earth or regions of it, the universe or parts of it, parts of the universe considered as an entity, the material universe as an ordered system, and so on. A third group of primary meanings relate to the inhabitants of the earth or sections of it.

 Taking this in its entirety, we see that the word world has three “levels”: 

—the personal level of one human being

—the level of societies of human beings

—the level of the cosmos itself. 

It thus reveals connections to the Buddhist concepts of discovering one’s awareness in three different ways: the self, the community, and the Dharma (the cosmos.) There’s also an implicit connection to the Holy Trinity.

The word is so rich that it would probably be worth reading the entire OED entry on it; I won’t repeat it here, however. Our interest is in unveiling the essential meaning of the word, which relates, above all, to the inner life of a human being and of the processes that both create and maintain it.

 Take note that one of Gurdjieff’s obligolnian strivings is understanding “the laws of world creation and world maintenance.” Let us take that to mean, first and foremost, the primary meaning of the word, rather than its secondary derivations related to cosmology or society. 

Since Gurdjieff was so persistently interested in the inward development of a human being and the evolution of their spiritual nature, we can presume that this was his primary interest. When he uses the word world, in other words, wherever it crops up in a direct way related to his teaching, he is referring to our own inner world, the psychospiritual inward space which we inhabit.

Our world is created by the impressions we take in; and it is correspondingly maintained. Recognizing this, we uncover potential meanings about Gurdjieff’s interpretation of time, which he called the Merciless Heropass: a force which erodes the place of not just God’s but our own, being.  

Because the word world contains the roots for both man (wer) and time (ald = alt = old, or age, in German)  we see that the very word world itself already contains a direct and embedded reference to the concept of both man and his relationship to time. 

Without man and time, there is no world.

The important point here, however, is to understand that we need to discover the meaning of the world in relationship to how we are within ourselves, as human beings.

 We live within a world in the sense of our very manifestation as human beings, along with our age, the time within which we manifest. In this sense we become entirely responsible, throughout the course of our being, for the creation and maintenance of the entire world of what’s called the Self. The Self  — also a Germanic word — means identity, one’s own person. Identity, of course, comes from a Latin word identidem  which means that is repeated, consistent. 

 One understands that the repetition of acts of awareness which distinguish us, in a separated sense, from the actions themselves (the action, for example, of simply seeing something or hearing something) is what creates our inner world. Within a Gurdjieffian context, World, means, in its most specific sense, consciousness and its experience as discovered through a human being. All of its other meanings come after that.

Gurdjieff’s comments about the confusion regarding the meaning of the word world  thus relate to an overarching commentary about our confusion about who we are. This, of course, was the whole point of his teaching in the grandest sense; and the obligolnian striving about the laws of world creation and world maintenance thus become a central point around which everything turns. 

What creates our sense of our Being?

 And how is it maintained?

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.