Meditations on Responsibility, Part III. More notes from March 3.

  

This question of responsibility is the greatest one we face, but we keep treating it like it is a small thing.

Gurdjieff emphasized duty: it’s well known that being-parktdolg-duty means, roughly put, “duty – duty – duty,” used in the sense of a debt owed. This is indeed the original meaning of the word. We owe a debt for our existence.

If we think we belong to ourselves, we don’t owe anyone a damn thing — and this is how most human beings proceed in life, taking as much as they can and giving as little as possible. Most of modern society is organized in this way, where people will do almost anything you please for money. I live in this world every day and it consistently astonishes me; well, perhaps not anymore, because I have finally accepted the fact that this is how human beings are.

Yet there is a much more important question on the table, and that is not what we can get, but what we ought to give. God has given us this extraordinary life with the extraordinary possibilities that our intelligence and our senses confer upon us; and we owe a debt to it to treat it as a treasure and a precious substance. We owe that same debt to our fellow human beings. Instead, generally speaking, everything is thrown on the trash heap as we root through what takes place like a pig hunting for truffles, that is, self satisfaction.

Responsibility to life is the payment of debt for its arising. Certainly an abstract concept to most people; and yet the organic sensation of being brings the question of debt into the immediate range of the sensations. Of the feeling. And it’s in sensation and feeling that we can begin to understand the question of what we owe very differently than through the intellect. This question is closely related to what Gurdjieff was talking about when he said that creatures have to acquire being: 

“…it is indispensable for the three-brained beings of your planet to have 'knowledge of being.'

     "Any information, even if true, in general gives beings only 'mental knowledge,' and this 'mental knowledge,' as I have already told you, serves them merely as a factor to lessen their possibilities of acquiring 'knowledge of being.'” (Beelzebub’s Tales, Chapter 41)

Through knowledge of being, I can begin to understand my debt. This question is separate from the external and individual circumstances of life. It is a whole thing related to the whole life. It doesn’t matter how many ideas I have or explore if I don’t undertake all of that work as an exercise centered on the development of sensation, in order to become a candidate for real feeling.

Our responsibilities are great and our sins are great. We spend most of our time writing ourselves little acquittals of one kind or another on inner notepaper, instead of confronting what we are and taking responsibility for it. To take responsibility requires a commitment that returns again and again to the moment and my relationship with it. I can think of anything I like; that doesn’t matter. What is important is to be here and to suffer what takes place. That is a form of responsibility.

Gurdjieff talks about “responsible” beings a fair amount in Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. These are those who understand what they owe. Payment of that debt is only through duty and through suffering and the putting aside of my own reactions, which will continue to harass me no matter what I do. I need to have a critical enough evaluation of who I am and what I’m doing to go at least one step than that in each situation. 

Of course I’ll fail; the fact is that I begin from a place where I am irresponsible. Yet if I don’t at least try to practice responsibility, I will never learn anything about it.

I became a candidate for responsibility nearly 20 years ago. I say candidate, because with all the advantages I was given and the assistance that was conferred upon me through initiation, there was still absolutely no substitute for all the work necessary to be done by me on my own in order to approach the beginning of responsibility. Only now do I begin to understand this not just in its flesh, its blood, and its bones, but in its marrow. I never could have understood the marrow of this question 20 years ago; and even now, I merely stand on the threshold, beginning to have an idea of its scope and its nature. 

This needs to be drawn down much more deeply into being not as a set of thoughts, but as a magnetism that can attract real effort from all of my various parts through the concentration of its force.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.