The Meaning of Life

Sculptural element from the Cloisters at L'Abbaye Fontevraud

Notes from Aug 17/18, Part 4 

One of the more interesting early documents from Gurdjieff is a document titled The Meaning of Life. 

While this particular document – attributed, but not conclusively, to Gurdjieff – is available in Early Talks of Gurdjieff, my discussion here references the copy in Louise March’s collection.

 I’ve been privy to arguments that this document was not actually by Gurdjieff; but its presence in the collection of his personal secretary, who was there in the early days, along with many other early Gurdjieff documents which are unassailably by him, argues strongly in favor of the proposition that he wrote it. It is prominently marked, in Louise’s copy, BY Gurdjieff, in capital letters, as though to emphasize the fact that it is indeed his voice and not someone else’s.

It seems reasonably certain, moreover, that this is something Gurdjieff wrote, rather than notes from a meeting. This is because the document carries the subtitle, “ Originally read to us as “pure and impure emotions.”

 What is perhaps more significant is that the original title of this document was changed. This must have been at Gurdjieff’s direct instruction, since it is impossible to imagine any of his pupils making a change of that nature without his direction. What we are left with here is the strong impression that Gurdjieff felt that the subject of pure and impure emotions was so essential to the central questions of his work that it was ”the meaning of life.”

 Gurdjieff’s contention, in the document in question, begins with the idea that emotion and intelligence are not separate faculties:

 We oppose emotion and reason. We speak of cold reason, of intellect superior to emotion. This is an error in definition. Intellect taken as a whole is also emotion.

 What Gurdjieff alludes to here, allowing for the vagaries of transcription and translation, is that emotion is also a whole form of intelligence. This is connected with the idea that the intellect, the sensation, and feeling all consist of whole minds that create, in their entirety, Gurdjieff’s “three-brained being.”

 What I think most essential, however, in examining this text is Gurdjieff’s connection between the personal (subjective) experience of emotion and the impersonal (objective) experience. There is no clarity, no light, no virtue in the personal experience: such emotion is impure; it lacks Hadewijch’s virtue.

The sign of growth of the emotion is the liberation from the personal element. Personal emotion fools, is partial, unjust. Greater knowledge is in proportion to fewer personal elements. The problem is to feel impersonally. Not all emotions are easily freed of the personal. Certain ones by their nature corrupt, separate. Others, like love, lead man from the material to the miraculous. There can be an impersonal envy; for example, envy of one who has conquered himself. An impersonal hate: the hate of injustice, of brutality. Impersonal anger--against stupidity, hypocrisy.

It is current to talk about "pure" and "impure" emotions; but we do not know how to define their difference. A pure emotion is one which is not mixed, which never seeks personal profit. An impure emotion is always mixed, it is never one; it is mixed with personal profit, with personal elements; it has sediments of other emotions.

 The aim of pure emotion, according to Gurdjieff, is a certain kind of knowing, intelligence: an understanding. And that understanding is only pure if it is unselfish. Impure emotion, that emotion tainted by self interest, is worthless:

An impure emotion does not give knowledge, or gives only confused knowledge. It sheds no light.

Hadewijch has important commentary on this matter in Letter 10: Virtues the Measure of Love.

Desire for God is sometimes sweet; nevertheless it is not wholly divine, for it wells up from the experience of the senses rather than from grace, and from nature rather than from the spirit. This sweetness awakens the soul more to the lesser good and less to the greater good, and lays deeper hold on what it likes than on what it needs: for it has the nature of what gave it birth.

 Here Hadewijch  explains quite clearly that superficial or underdeveloped spiritual experience has a character of selfishness: it lays deeper hold on what it likes than on what it needs, for it has the nature of what gave it birth.  This explains that our impulses and desires are firmly rooted in our attachment to the material; and we cannot help what we are — a subject that she brings up repeatedly in her discussion of human frailty and sin.

Such sweetness is experienced by the imperfect man as well as by him who is perfect. And the imperfect man imagines he is in greater love because he tastes sweetness; yet it is not pure but impure. Besides, even if the sweetness is pure and wholly divine, and this is a delicate question to decide, love is not to be measured by sweetness but by the possession of virtues together with charity, as you have heard.

Hadewijch makes the distinction between pure and impure and unambiguous terms here: only the “perfect,” or complete (completed, fully made), man is pure. The idea of “perfect” man is a predecessor to Swedenborg’s invocation of spiritual regeneration, a remaking of being in the image of God — which is of course a fundamentally Christian concept embodied in the existence of Christ himself. It’s the contamination of our own self interest that leaves us impure; and surely this is the one defect that seems impossible to remove in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, leaving those who develop spiritually consigned to the eternal torture of purgatory:

“…from this time on, that these sacred arisings began to have in their presences special properties which were obtained from this, that certain manifestations of other parts of the given being, in whom these sacred arisings were coated, began to enter and to be assimilated in the composition of the presences of these higher parts and to give results which came to be called ‘sins-of-the-body-of-the-soul’.

“These same results served as a cause that these cosmic formations, even if they had in their perfecting reached the required gradation of Objective Reason, had ceased to correspond in their common presences to the conditions of existence in the sphere of the Most Most Holy Protocosmos, and from that time on they lost the possibility of being deemed worthy to unite themselves with it.

—All and Everything (First Edition), Page 800 (edited for brevity)

 We may conclude, in other words, that Gurdjieff’s view of the idea of sin centered around the impurity of selfishness; and that it is the one stubborn factor that continues to persist no matter how much a human being purifies their sense, their aim, and their will. It is the original sin: not the wish to have knowledge — that in itself is a good thing, a virtue, perhaps the best thing, as his essay points out – but to have it for myself. And indeed, Hadewijch repeatedly draws the distinction between wanting to have things for oneself and have things in God. They are not at all the same thing; and we confuse them repeatedly.

 Gurdjieff felt that understanding the difference between the personal and impersonal, the selfish and unselfish, constituted the meaning of life. This understanding is, in other words, at the very core of understanding what it means to be a human being in a virtuous way. It emphasizes the deep connections between Swedenborg’s teaching and Gurdjieff’s.

 One of my oldest mentors in the Gurdjieff work has reported to me that they, as they in their own words prepare themselves for death, are reading Emmanuel Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell. 

This text, along with Hadewijch’s letters, ought to be considered as essential reading for those in the Gurdjieff work if they wish to deepen their exposure to the important esoteric roots from which the leaves and shoots of Gurdjieff’s teachings emerge.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.