April 19 – How It Is

Perhaps one of the great dangers of Gurdjieff’s approach to inner development is understanding "I am" in the wrong way.

The ordinary mind get ahold of this idea; and before you know it, it gets involved with itself. How am I? I'm like this. I'm like that. "I am" observing this and that about me.

More and more “I” inserts itself into this equation of thought, this formulation that continues to investigate itself, and gradually — if not all of a sudden, which is commonplace enough already — everything is all about me and how I am.

Yet the world is not about how I am. The world is about how it is. And the "it" is that selfsame it that Gurdjieff mentions in his aphorism, "like what it does not like."

What it likes is itself. And what it likes to be involved in is a vanity that it is important, that what takes place in it matters, that to engage in self-evaluation of itself is meritorious. It becomes, in the end, quite literally, an egoistic investigation into the ego. It is, furthermore, supremely self-important, because it presumes an elitism regarding self-observation and self-examination that puts one apart from others and, because the ego has seized the activity as its own, superior to them. There's a professed humility present; but it is not an actual humility. It is ego-based humility. And there's no doubt that even the medieval monastics were rightfully wary of exactly this kind of thing.

There, then, is the problem. Yet it does us little good to speak of problems without trying to understand where a more effective path may lie.

It wasn't directly congruent to this line of contemplation, but yesterday it occurred to me that another great danger in the Gurdjieff work is this presumption of spiritual superiority, of the chance to enter an elite who has greater possibilities than the average person. Gurdjieff's work, from the moment that Ouspensky encountered it—which puts us back to 1917 or 1918, over 100 years ago –pitched itself towards that harmonic overtone. People are “asleep" – they are inferior —but there's a possibility of waking up. It might seem reasonable to claim that any aspirational discipline, whether internal or external, would have to take a position something like this; and yet a danger arises at once, because the discipline at once seems to migrate towards a place where one can become other—better than others, rather than to become what one is. 

To be awake, I feel sure, is to become what one is, not some ersatz and improved version. 

Gurdjieff's whole teaching about essence and personality was about exactly this question, and is worth revisiting on that point alone. Some core understandings emerge from that process. It's very different to become what one is, instead of becoming some better version of oneself. 

To know what we are, then – this is a proletarian effort, and it is exactly that effort — of the obyvatel, the good householder — that we ought to be undertaking. Not the one that put us on a pedestal from which we can examine ourselves, whether for assets or defects. From this point of view, seeing ourselves as good or bad is already a conceit. To presume we can judge ourselves, as much as the presumption that we can judge anyone else, is a form of narcissism. And judgment, of course, is an intellectual activity involving comparative thought and a "feeling" – whether real, imagined, subjectively constructed or objectively legitimate—that lead to a conclusion of some kind, a place to stop in which we imagine that we now know something.

Staying balanced on the edge of the unknown is a quite different thing, I think you will agree: and what we are to ourselves, as well as others, is essentially unknown if the initial premise of “sleep” is legitimate. We are called to a state of consciousness without inflection: and this, indeed, leads us to the edge of an investigation of what Meister Eckhart meant when he referred to indifference — Gleichgültigkeit, in German, which means, in its most exact translation, all things being of equal value. 

The English phrase equivalent is "all else being equal," a qualifier for certain situations, which ought, according to the master,  to be applied not as a qualifier but as a definition of everything we experience. 

In a state of indifference, it is not possible to be better than. It is only possible to be as good as.

That, of course, is the positivist perspective. One could also argue that it is only possible to be as bad as; and that, as well, can bear fruit if it's examined with intelligence rather than malice.

How is it?

This question doesn't contain “I” in it. And within that is the kernel that might sprout from one of the three chief esoteric prayers I engage in the mornings. That particular prayer, the second prayer, is quite simple, like the other two. And yet although it is quite simple I've spent over 20 years contemplating it without really penetrating much of exactly what it means, other than to know that it poses questions for me that I need to confront.

That prayer is as follows: “There is no I, there is only truth. The way to the truth is through the heart."

And I think I will end here for this morning.

Hoping that you find yourself in good relationship today,

warmly,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.