Sincerity and Reasoning

2015-01-31

Sincerity - the quality of being free from pretense, deceit, or hypocrisy. from the Latin sincerus meaning clean, pure, sound.

Gurdjieff makes clear that any real process of reasoning with ourselves also requires the ability and willingness to be sincere with ourselves. At first glance this may seem like an odd combination, reasoning and sincerity. But everywhere we look; in politics, in religion, and strangely enough especially in science, there seems to be a near total absence of sincerity... with damaging to disastrous consequences.

Unfortunately, few of us have any standing to be critical of others in this area. If I’m willing to be even a little sincere with myself, I see that:

• there are certain reasoning processes that I’m going to willfully ignore,
• there are other reasoning processes that I’m going to sabotage by distorting the facts,
• there are some reasoning processes that I’m too afraid to follow out,
• I don’t even recognize the need for certain, quite obvious reasoning processes,

Here are some examples from this list.

Willful ignorance: I have gone through the process of reasoning with myself about proper eating many times. But when it comes right down to it, I ignore that reasoning and just eat what I want to eat at the time.  Well, not all of the time. In rereading this I have to acknowledge that slowly the reasoning process around food is changing me.

Distorting the facts: I like to think of myself as being very frugal with my financial affairs. And I can point to all sorts of ‘savings’ that I achieve during the day by recycling things that others have thrown away, buying the cheaper generic products, forgoing certain purchases, etc. Those are obvious ‘facts’ that I can point to with pride. But the ‘real’ fact is… that all this time, energy and attention spent on saving a few pennies here and there would be vastly more useful, financially speaking, if I focused on managing my larger and much more significant financial situation, earning dollars instead of saving pennies for example. In other words, I’m consistently being “penny wise and pound foolish” as they say.

Fear: Without going into the details I’ve often seen that I’m afraid to apply reason to my personal relationships. Perhaps I’m not alone in this.

Unrecognized need for reasoning: Unfortunately I can’t give a current example of this… for obvious reasons. The best I can do is to give an example from out of the past.  For most of my early life I thought that things just happened and that things just happened to me. I wasn’t aware that I had a pattern that was actually creating many of the events in my life. So, of course, it never occurred to me to undertaking a reasoning process about how and why I was creating certain patterns of events, and more particularly to reason toward understanding and changing those patterns.

So that’s my situation, a consistent lack of sincerity in many areas. My task, as mentioned in the comments on eating, is to let the reasoning process slowly ‘intrude’ on all of these areas.  I say “slowly”, because it seems that I can’t take a sudden change. I say “intrude”, because that’s what it feels like. But my aim is to welcome this intrusion. Perhaps by slowly learning how to welcome this intrusion in these circumstances I can learn how to more quickly apply them to other circumstances in the future.