Notes on the Inner Meaning of Conscious Labor, part IV

 Intentional suffering involves the servant girl not only learning the language of the household, but agreeing to do all of the work that she is given. 

The house is a huge, complicated operation, with untold numbers of dependents, and that entire community all has to act together in concert to support one another. This means that inevitably some servants — perhaps all of them, at times — have to take on unpleasant and distasteful tasks on behalf of the others. Maybe they need to clean toilets. But no matter what the task is, the servant has to put her particular personal opinions about it aside and discharge her obligations as is required.

Gurdjieff, putting it in his own words, said that Beings everywhere in the universe engage in conscious labor in order  “afterwards to be free to lighten as much as possible of the sorrow of OUR COMMON FATHER.” 

 The idea of suffering comes from a variant of Latin sufferre,  which means to bear, undergo, endure, or carry. If one takes a close look at it, it's actually a combination of the two Latin words suf, to get under, and ferre, to carry,  so it means that one lifts a burden. It conveys the further meaning, imparted in the 1300s, of consent implied by lack of interference, or, as we might say today, to allow.

 I want to remind myself here again that as we discuss all of these ideas, which may begin to sound excessively intellectual, we're always and forever speaking about an inward action undertaken on behalf of God, that is, the higher vibrations that inwardly form all of the matter and Being in the solar system and the cosmos.

It’s clear enough that the comment about lightening the sorrow of our common father is an inference of taking on part of the burden of the sorrow of God, and the word lightening is very specifically used, as opposed to the word — for example — relieving, because it stays close to the original Latin idea of getting under something and lifting it, carrying it. 

Our duty and our obligation is to help lift up the burden of life itself — to raise the level.

If we think about typical aspects of spirituality commonly shared across many different traditions, we will note that compassion and love are almost always essential to it:

He asked, 'How can a man recognize the works of the Holy Ghost in his soul?'

She said, 'By three things. The first is that he daily grows less in the way of bodily things, desires, and natural love. The second is that he continually grows in divine love and grace. The third is that, with love and eagerness, he devotes his labors more to his fellow men than to himself.'

—Meister Eckhart’s Feast, From The Complete Mystical Works, p. 583. 

The following is from the same piece, p. 584:

The maiden said, 'Tell me, Father, how can anyone know he is a child of the heavenly Father?'

He said, 'By three things. The first is, that a man performs all his actions out of love. The second is, that he accepts all things equally from God. The third is, that he pins all his hopes on none but God alone.'

 I think we can quite easily see the connections between Meister Eckhart’s brilliant and intensely Catholic teachings about the nature of the soul and its duty and the beautifully embroidered mythological material which Gurdjieff put in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson.  He presented us with a devil enlightened enough to understand, honor and admire God’s plan: even the devil loves God, because it is his duty.  This is a delightful complexity I’d like to explore more in some future text.

 Raising the rate of inward vibration through conscious labor lifts the soul towards the type of effort that can indeed lighten the sorrow of both God and our fellow man. Intentional suffering, however, can’t begin simply with outer action, which is automatic and uninformed. It has to begin with a relationship to an inner energy that organically forms a core understanding of and relationship with the type of suffering that we’re required to engage in.

 In my own experience, the contradictions we constantly discover in ourselves arise from a failure to raise the harmonic rate of our vibration in our Being; and this failure, in turn, always rests on the temptation to understand work, in a spiritual sense, first outwardly and first intellectually, instead of first inwardly and first physically. We do not plant our church on the rock of an inward faith; and that faith must arise from an organic vibration, not an idea we have about faith. Faith, after all, arises from Latin fidēs, trust— and trust belongs much more to instinct and to emotion than the other parts of Being. We must instinctively sense, in other words, the nature of Being and its purpose. 

“…almost all the three-brained beings arising on the various planets of our Megalocosmos either know of or instinctively sense the existence of the Holy Planet Purgatory, it is only the three-brained beings on your planet who remain unaware of it…”

 Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, The Holy Planet Purgatory, p. 802.

 We think too much. 

Of course, one could accuse this set of notes of the same pitfall; yet I would remind myself that we think precisely not just in order to think, but also to understand the difference between thinking and not thinking, so that when we decide not to think, we can do it properly. There is a faculty in the inward life that does not think with thoughts at all; and an awakening of the permanent sense of Being, a sensation that does not fail when the mind is weak, offers us a reliable partner in this effort of not thinking, which can exist in us all the time while we at the same time think.

I would remind myself here, as well, that while the thinking part functions perfectly well for what it is good at — thinking — and is absolutely essential to Being, the other two parts are also thinking, even though they aren’t doing it with words. 

The absurdity of attempting to completely extinguish the thinking part as though it wasn’t needed for three centered Being is a profound error; at best, we ought to quiet it down in order to discover how the other two parts work, but we should never try to crush it like a bug.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.