Reasoning about the Work
2015-01-13 (Gurdjieff's Birthday)
Many people, maybe even most people, seem to think that the 4th Way, the Work, is mainly about personal transformation for individuals. If one observed how most Work groups operate, or read descriptions of Gurdjieff’s activities it would certainly look that way. But how would it look if we put this assumption through a process of reasoning?
I partially did that today in response to someone in our group, who was shocked to hear me say,
“…there is often a mistaken idea that the Work is primarily about personal transformation. It includes personal transformation, but that’s actually secondary to the main aims of the Work. We need to be clear about this.”
My reply to their email took the form of an abbreviated, informal reasoning process as follows:
Yup. It is a shock to find out that it ain’t about us… that we may have a part to play, and that we can play that part much better if we do the work of transformation. But it doesn’t take a genius to see that human beings are just one little blip, in the history of one little planet, in one little solar system, in one ordinary galaxy, in the vast expanse of the universe. Abdullah and others have taught that there have been other attempts at creating vehicles for consciousness (goaffadh birds among others), and that some of those “experiments” have been abandoned. The human experiment may eventually be abandoned as well.
From this we can clearly see that the Work is in fact busy trying to accomplish something. But even the whole of humanity may not end up playing a significant role in that Work. So it might behoove us as individual humans to have a little humility about our part in the greater scheme of things. If, as you rightly say, we learn to serve, then we do have a part to play. And the cosmos is certainly interested in our development from that point of view, sending teachers and teachings and the like. But we may be more “cosmic mutton and wool” than we like to think. This was certainly Gurdjieff’s teaching, and that was a shock to people. But this is plainly stated in his three lines of work, only one of which focuses on our personal transformation. It’s also an integral part of his doctrine of reciprocal maintenance… that everything feeds on something and is in turn food for something else. In that sense we are no more important than carrots except that we’re just a little higher up on the food chain.
Another way of looking at it is that we’re just tiny cells in the body of the solar system, intimately tied to the fate and destiny of our sun, just as individual cells in our body are tied to our bodily fate. So yes, we care about our cells, but typically not the fate of any one particular cell. So does this change for us as individual human beings simply because we’re a little higher up on the scale of evolution? Maybe… but compared to the trillions of suns and planets who each have their own fate and destiny, our individual human situations look pretty small.
To me, this line of reasoning seems pretty obvious. It’s also in agreement with my understanding of how the cosmic laws work, with many of the teachers that you site, and with my day to day experience of the world.
I concluded with…
That said, I’m open to updating my understanding… and this does happen on a regular basis, so I readily acknowledge that I could be wrong about all of this.
We’re quite likely to continue this reasoning process, and I’ll post the results as they transpire.
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Comments
While I agree with much of
While I agree with much of what you said here, John, I must take exception to your comment on carrots. Carrots are much more in tune with Nature than humans. That said, you are right that we are no more important than carrots from the narrow perspective of reciprocal maintenance. Or as Castaneda framed it, a warrior's humility is grounded on the fact that Death makes all beings equal. Perhaps where we may have an edge on carrots lies in the possibility that we can work to change our level of being, and in that become a support or food for a higher level of consciousness further up the food chain. The carrots I have known have not been able to change their level of consciousness, at least as far as I have been able to discern.
Changing the level of Being of things around us.
In your post you appear to be using the phrase "level of being" and "level of consciousness" interchangeably. My own understanding is that these are probably two related but distinct aspects of our nature.
But what really intrigued me about your post was considering whether carrots actually do increase their level of consciousness or their level of being or both. And then a related question arose, "Do I, acting as gardener, have a role to play here?"
After some pondering it became clear to me that we have a responsibility to not only raise our own level of being, but to also raise the level of being of the material, biological and human world around us. And it may go further than that.
I was put in mind of an event at Sherborne House where JGB had us dig over a plot of land in an abandoned field. He later said, in effect, that we had raised the level of being of that plot. It took me many years of struggle to see and really understand the simple truth of that description. By digging over the soil we had increased its level of organization and it's potential... hence its level of being. Of course in one sense, by digging it up, we had introduced significant chaos into an existing system of order. But that very chaos allowed for a new pattern of organization with new potentials.
Another example of us increasing the being of the material world occurs when we take a pallet of paints and produce a painting like the Mona Lisa.
But I'll leave it to you to ponder our influence on poor Mr. Carrot.
small potatoes
Nicoll used to say that a cooked potato was more intelligent than a raw potato....
On the evolution of carrots and cosmos
No doubt you are right, John, about my confusing the consciousness/being distinction. And as I’m mulling that over in my mind, I wonder if the problem here lies in my misuse of the word ‘level’. There seems to be some significant relation between consciousness and being, at least as reflected in a common characterization of the nature of the Divine in variants of Hinduism as satchitananda or being-consciousness-bliss. However, as that Oneness differentiates into the universe of experience, perhaps differences of ‘level’ emerge, and I have no sense of how to comprehend such complexities. Oneness, on the other hand, seems so simple in comparison and therefore so attractive.
Perhaps contrasting the concepts of ‘food chain’ and ‘reciprocal maintenance’ might shed some light on ‘difference in level’. If a rabbit does a B&E in your garden and eats a carrot, that could be viewed as a being higher on the food chain eating a being lower on the food chain. Perhaps this could even be reasoned through in an esoteric evolution frame – the more complex sentience of the rabbit raising (however slowly) the level of consciousness and being, the energies and genes of the carrot by assimilating it through its body, then returning the modified carrot back to its ground of being. In a ‘reciprocal maintenance’ frame, the loving gardener who plants the seeds, waters the growing plants, removes weeds, and watches over the carrots with satisfaction and gratitude (this could be a more realized gardener) is infusing the consciousness of the carrot with the higher consciousness of loving intentions. I would like to believe this raises the level of consciousness of both gardener and carrot. So, in a reciprocal maintenance perspective, this relationship would not just be about the higher eating the lower, and the lower feeding the higher, but of both growing in consciousness through the intentional quality of consciousness in the relationship between levels.
I don’t know if and where this ends. Native culture sees everything as imbued with a soul, as living. Similarly, in a true story about an American learning the Japanese art of archery, the student sees that his bowstring is getting frazzled. He removes the old string and throws it on the ground, and is just about to install the new bowstring. His kyudo master sees this and yells at him, “Hey, that string has a life too, you know!” So, the question arises for me, ‘How might it change me to approach everything with an attitude of reverence for the Divine in it (when I actually remember to awaken that attitude)? I know from experience that it slows me down. For example, when I eat, typically I eat to feed myself, and that happens fairly quickly and distractedly. When I remember to eat with gratitude, my actions slow right down and have a more focused, intentional quality. The archetypal example of this might be the Japanese tea ceremony where both attention and intention are at their peak.
Drawing these loose threads together, I realize one misunderstanding I have about Reciprocal Maintenance is in emphasizing the food chain aspect of it, particularly what a higher level receives from a lower level. Instead, I’m beginning to see the ‘giving’ aspect as more of the essence of Reciprocal Maintenance, e.g. what the gardener gives to the carrot to raise it into the highest quality carrot it can be. The carrot gives what it is (or what it has become through the gardener-carrot relationship) for the wellbeing of the gardener. This is how I understand the ‘service’ line of work. It seems like reciprocal maintenance has service at its core, or perhaps the opposite, that reciprocal maintenance is the outcome of a deep practice of service. Regardless, I find it really difficult to remember to practice. I hope God is not equally forgetful lest I blink in and out of existence depending on what’s on his mind that day.
Levels of Being
In response to your comment in paragraph 1...
"However, as that Oneness differentiates into the universe of experience, perhaps differences of ‘level’ emerge, and I have no sense of how to comprehend such complexities."
I would direct your attention to Gurdjieff's table of hydrogens which gives you a tool and a method for doing exactly that. Here are a couple of quotes from In Search of the Miraculous, chapter 9...
"The 'table of hydrogens' makes it possible to examine all substances making up man's organism from the point of view of their relation to different planes of the universe. And as every function of man is a result of the action of definite substances, and as each substance is connected with a definite plane in the universe, this fact enables us to establish the relation between man's functions and the planes of the universe."
"So far," he said, "we have looked upon the 'table of hydrogens' as a table of vibrations and of the densities of matter which are in an inverse proportion to them. We must now realize that the density of vibrations and the density of matter express many other properties of matter. For instance, till now we have said nothing about the intelligence or the consciousness of matter. Meanwhile the speed of vibrations of a matter shows the degree of intelligence of the given matter. You must remember that there is nothing dead or inanimate in nature. Everything in its own way is alive, everything in its own way is intelligent and conscious. Only this consciousness and intelligence is expressed in a different way on different levels of being—that is, on different scales. But you must understand once and for all that nothing is dead or inanimate in nature, there are simply different degrees of animation and different scales.
"The 'table of hydrogens,' while serving to determine the density of matter and the speed of vibrations, serves at the same time to determine the degree of intelligence and consciousness because the degree of consciousness corresponds to the degree of density or the speed or vibrations. This means that the denser the matter the less conscious it is, the less intelligent. And the denser the vibrations, the more conscious and the more intelligent the matter.
It takes a significant amount of work just to connect with the table of hydrogens, let alone master it, but it's worth the effort. We've studied one application of all this through the idea of worlds expressed by the number of laws that govern them... hence World 6, World 12, World 24, World 48, World 96 and so on.
And by the way, your reference to, "Native culture sees everything as imbued with a soul, as living." is directly echoed by Gurdjieff's expression, "But you must understand once and for all that nothing is dead or inanimate in nature, there are simply different degrees of animation and different scales."
Your comment "I’m beginning to see the ‘giving’ aspect as more of the essence of Reciprocal Maintenance, e.g. what the gardener gives to the carrot to raise it into the highest quality carrot it can be." is also worth highlighting because humans have a special role to play in terms of consciously transmitting energies and understanding both up and down.