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,
Another aspect of our inner resistance is suggestion. I was just editing a chapter from Abdullah Dugan’s book, “The Quest” on this topic, when it struck me that both the positive and the negative effects of suggestions influence our ability to reason. In terms of the question, “What keeps us from being able to reason effectively?”, the following questions and responses are worth noting.
So real thought would be the only thing you could counter suggestion with?
“By using your three brains you can know how to weigh up a suggestion. You have to work in a balanced way to be able to understand suggestion. A suggestion may be levelled at your moving centre, and because of your experience in your moving centre you could say "That's just rubbish", whereas another person who wasn't developed in his moving centre would believe it...
Over the last few days we’ve talked about the reasoning process from a number of different perspectives. And in answer to the question above we could cite several explanations such as not having much experience with ‘real’ reasoning, mistaking our ordinary thinking process for ‘real’ reasoning, lack of courage, lack of support from our environment, and so on. However, probably the main obstacle for many of us is that we just flat don’t want to do it.
One of the aspects of reasoning that we’ve mentioned, but which should be highlighted is that the reasoning process is personal. Two people with virtually identical external circumstances could come to two entirely different ‘destinations’ through the process of reasoning. There are several reasons for this...
The men’s group met here today… ok, we have one woman in the group too, and we spent nearly four hours going through a process of taking seriously the possibility of living in three worlds. Gurdjieff mentions this possibility in the last chapter of ‘Life is Real Only Then, When “A Am”’ where he says,
‘And thus, every man, if he is just an ordinary man, that is, one who has never consciously "worked on himself," has two worlds; and if he has worked on himself, and has become a so to say "candidate for another life," he has even three worlds.’
The developed skill of reasoning is quite rare in most of the people that we meet, and this probably includes ourselves. But that doesn’t by any means suggest that we don’t use reasoning. In fact we use it all the time, but usually in a very unskilled way.
One of the participants in the online group gave an excellent observation yesterday about dealing with deeply felt negativity, anger and rage. The negativity was caused by noticing a connection between a newspaper story and the unexpected death of his daughter’s 5 year old bulldog. The connection was about dog treats from China being sold in the US, dog treats that were and are known to cause kidney failure and death in dogs.
The clarity of this participants report allowed me to make the following response which gives an example of how and why we need to develop the skill of reasoning:
Reasoning is a skill. It's not a natural ability for most of us. In fact most of us have never learned to reason. One of the components of reasoning is the ability to think, and most of us can't even do that consistently and effectively. Nevertheless, we can, occasionally do both. We just have to be aware that a special effort and a special development of this skill is necessary. And as with most skills, the more we practice it the better we get.
Reasoning is most useful when we want to change or transform some habit, attitude, conditioning or way of thinking that we've had for a very long time. Consequently we can expect considerable resistance from our physical, mental or emotional centers that have a vested interest in maintaining the old ways.
Reason is the capacity for consciously making sense of things, applying logic, establishing and verifying facts, and changing or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information.[1] It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, language, mathematics, and art, and is normally considered[by whom?] to be a definitive characteristic of human nature.[2] The concept of reason is sometimes referred to as rationality and sometimes as discursive reason, in opposition to intuitive reason.[3]
Reason or "reasoning" is associated with thinking, cognition, and intellect. Reason, like habit or intuition, is one of the ways by which thinking comes from one idea to a related idea. For example, it is the means by which rational beings understand themselves to think about cause and effect, truth and falsehood, and what is good or bad. It is also closely identified with the ability to self-consciously change beliefs, attitudes, traditions, and institutions, and therefore with the capacity for freedom and self-determination.[4]
Probably the most obvious place where we need to reason with ourselves is about death in general, and our own death in particular. In Beelzebub’s Tales, Gurdjieff says that in order to counteract the consequences of the malevolent organ kundabuffer, a new organ needs to be implanted in man that would constantly remind him of his own death and the death of everyone around him.
We can intentionally implant something very much like this organ in ourselves simply through reasoning. I say ‘simply’ because it is simple, but that’s not the same thing as saying it’s easy.
