We think we want to know what we are, and yet everything we think we know is based on misunderstanding.
Since we don't know that, how can we know that our wish to know something will lead us to things we actually need to know?
Gurdjieff wanted to call men back to a practice that takes them down through the many levels of experience and being to a ground floor which has been entirely forgotten. It's a practice that goes beyond. It goes beyond Zen Buddhism; it goes beyond the basic understandings of conventional Christianity, and it goes beyond Islam. It includes all of these good practices; it
informs them: it helps them to become inwardly formed in a more correct way. But at the heart of this teaching lies a secret no one really wants to know, and which is perhaps misunderstood by almost every practice.
Liberation and freedom are not about joy, happiness, and so on. It's not a casting off of the negative so that one can dance in green meadows, play the flute, and admire the sun, blue sky, and puffy white clouds.
Liberation and freedom are instead the
assumption of a burden, and that burden—willingly taken by any soul that truly begins to understand this question—is to take on a portion of the sorrow of God.
Gurdjieff explained this exquisitely in the chapter entitled “The Holy Planet Purgatory” which is found in
Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson. Any being that begins to “perfect” itself eventually comes to the point where no matter what it does, an inevitable and unavoidable flaw that prevents final reunion with God is expressed. In a certain sense, the implication is that although there is an infinite amount of Love and Mercy in God for his creation—and nothing, repeat,
nothing can transcend that Mercy and that Love; it lies outside the realm of human conception, and even tangential contact with it would for all practical purposes annihilate us—there is no way for us to reunite with the Lord.
The endless sorrow that penetrates the universe—a sorrow that arises strictly from this endless and endlessly creative Love— arises exactly for this reason, and the infinite amount of Compassion that extends throughout the universe and saturates the holy planet Purgatory is there for the same reason.
The longing to return can never be expunged.
This is the search, the hint and the taste of something missing, that one always hears in the best of Gurdjieff's music. And it is that
Feeling quality, above all, that might lead us to an understanding of where we are and what we are.
Christ, as it's said, was a man “well acquainted with sorrows.” Any real Feeling that arises in a man must ultimately connect with this sorrow. Joy is a wonderful thing, but it's not the same. One can feel higher joy as well; some feeling, real Feeling, makes that possible, but that's still not the same. Joy and sorrow aren't separated properties; they share the same identity. Not a philosophy; a Truth. The human organism is designed to sense this quite exactly; yet it doesn't. Why? I can't tell you. Gurdjieff gave us ten thousand reasons. Perhaps all of them are true.
We have lost the ability to distinguish between what is pleasurable and what is right. This needs to be considered very carefully, because for all men, they believe that what is pleasurable
is what is right. That one point in itself might explain the mess the whole planet is in right now, don't you think?
All real Feeling leads us in the direction of
Purgatory, and nowhere else. There is no path to heaven from where we are except through Purgatory—not a place, but an
inner state. And all of this action is so distinct from ordinary emotion that trying to understand it from this side, from where we usually stand in our emotional being, is utterly pointless. Everything, repeat, everything ends up being philosophical discussions. We end up having philosophical discussions in which we firmly assert that we are not discussing philosophically. Keep an eye on that. I suspect you will encounter it today, tomorrow, and the next. Even worse, our fundamental dishonesty and the buffers that we use to insulate our egos allow us to accuse everyone else of doing exactly what it is that we are doing, while not seeing
in the least how we are.
Surely anyone who does see this must hang their heads in shame.
The point is that none of this involves a real contact with the self and with Being, and all of the speculation, hypothesizing, and pontificating has nothing to do with an actual emotional sensation of our state or where we are, which can ultimately lead nowhere but to the most profound and absolute sense of anguish.
I suppose readers will think that this is a supremely pessimistic philosophy; yet there is absolutely no pessimism whatsoever in it. It is not only wholly objective, but also absolutely optimistic, in the sense that we do have the chance to connect with truth, and fulfill our sacred obligations... and if there is any kind of joy at all, there can be no greater joy than this.
We can know what we are. We can know our nature, and we have the opportunity to repent.
Perhaps this idea of repentance sounds too Catholic or even Calvinistic for the reader, or perhaps readers suspect that I am delivering some kind of Easter-ish soliloquy here, in keeping with the season. It's true that at this time of year, the vibrations of the planetary atmosphere are filled with the need for this type of action; yet that doesn't belong to the Christians alone. The vibrations are there for everyone who can be helped by them, regardless of their religious inclination. Even, perhaps, for all mankind.
There is nothing ecumenical about repentance. This is an organic duty, an obligation that can only be truly sensed through a contract with one's higher parts. It isn't an outer repentance; and perhaps more importantly, one must understand that
no action one undertakes in the outer world can achieve it.
But in order to understand this, one has to turn everything in the cart upside down.
I respectfully hope you will take good care.