The thing to take away from this is; if you are Doing, you are in the world of phenomena. If you're trying to change something, you're in the world of phenomena. If you are observing, trying to understand through reasoning, sensing, not intervening, then you're in the world of Being. Most people don't have a world of Being, so I know I'm appealing to a somewhat small audience here.
BE CAREFUL OF WHAT YOU LOVE
I suppose I should start by quoting from Spinoza:
“… all happiness or unhappiness depends solely on the quality of the object to which we are bound by love.”
Love is simply the feeling we have toward someone or something that gives us pleasure. It is not uncommon to hear someone say “I love my car” or some such thing. And of course, people love others that give them pleasure. It would be a very odd situation if someone loved a person who dished out pain.
In one of the few autobiographical parts of his work, Spinoza states very clearly that he saw “the hollowness and futility of everything that is encountered in daily life …”. As a result, he sought something that would deliver “continuous and supreme joy to all eternity.”
What Spinoza proposes to us in his works is that we transcend ourselves. If you think about it, this is not a particularly silly idea. We are born, experience transient pleasures and pains, and eventually grow old, sick, and then die. Only a fool would invest the whole of their attention on a rotting bag of flesh, and yet this is the default way people live their lives.
The question then naturally arises as to where we might invest our attention. For Spinoza, it was on the infinite and eternal, although this doesn’t particularly help us. The starting point is somewhat more modest. So that our attention is not consumed in our day to day dramas and fascinations, we need to understand our emotional nature and how we respond to things. This is not a trivial work, and until we have some understanding and skills in this area any additional work will simply be in the imagination. The real power is always in the emotions, and as Spinoza states, someone who does not have a handle on their emotional nature is in bondage.
But let’s imagine that someone has worked to understand their emotions and has developed the ability to consume their emotions instead of being consumed by them. Such a person will have established just a little bit of space between their emotional nature and their understanding. This is not the goal, but it is what happens. This leaves the attention and intelligence free to consider other things. As such we can start to look at the world beyond our own immediate concerns. Gurdjieff said that objective reason requires that we extend our vision and understanding beyond our subjective experience and embrace as much understanding of the totality of existence as we can. This needs to happen in a way that brings pleasure because if we experience pleasure we will love our understanding. And guess what? We have now identified with something much larger than us and can leave our temporal, pain-ridden existence to do what it does. We also get a perspective on human existence; described by Spinoza as nothing more than a speck.
So in summary, if all your attention is directed toward yourself you will suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. However if your pleasure is found in things beyond your own insignificant existence, you will be less prone to the fate of a tiny finite creature. You will of course die, but a quote from Einstein sums the whole thing up very nicely:
The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men
SWITCH IT OFF
You may have noticed that you do not worry while you are asleep. People can have anxiety based dreams, but generally speaking when the conscious mind closes down, so does thought. While we place the conscious mind on a pedestal, it is only the end point for subconscious drives, and all these drives derive in some way from the desire to survive. In fact the role for the conscious mind is simply that of navigating the external world so that we survive in an adequate manner. Think about it. Most of our daily activity is concerned with earning money, finding a mate, getting shelter and food, and striving to become part of a social group (safety in numbers). We may spend some of our time being entertained – cinema, opera, concerts, philosophy – and so on, but the majority of our daily actions are concerned with survival.
The reason we are such a successful species is that this waking consciousness is like an amplifier. Maybe we get fired resulting in cascading thoughts about paying the mortgage, and finding another job. Dozens of job applications, sleepless nights worrying about paying the bills, frantic activity until another job is found. This amplifier goes into overdrive, working out all the combinations of circumstances and finding potential solutions. A hungry dog on the other hand simply goes hunting, and if it fails to catch a rabbit it will just keep hunting until it either dies or successfully catches some prey. Its waking consciousness is far less developed and so it cannot amplify events in the hope of resolving them.
This amplifier, which we call our mind, is inherently anxious. The more it thinks about things the more energy it expends, more anxiety is created and resolution may or may not happen. The ideal solution is to police this monster in our heads and switch it off when we feel that thoughts are simply running away with themselves and serving no useful purpose. Obviously we cannot ignore the callings of the survival drive, but we can switch the mind off when further thought would serve no useful purpose. Meditation is useful in this respect, as is watching a movie, getting stoned – or whatever. The important thing to realize is that our mind is an anxiety machine designed to serve the needs of the survival drive. To live a reasonable life we need to learn to switch it off when it has served its purpose.
HOW TO ACHIEVE NOTHING
One of the most exciting things I ever read on the nature of work on oneself is that however you come into the work, whatever it is that's motivating you to get involved, this is the very thing that will work against you once you're in the work. It's a bitch isn't it? If you are crazy for knowledge, as indeed I was, then that drive is the very thing that will work against you once you're in there. And that's a difficult situation. Some people come in because maybe they feel some devotional or emotional attraction. It’s the very thing that will stop them moving on. In my case, it was intellectual ambition, a desire to understand everything with my head. I had a somewhat hard time with all of that. Anyway, this is the way it is for most people. They come into the work with one set of characteristics, and it's those very characteristics that surely and slowly, over time, that have to die. The strange thing about all this work is that you know you're getting somewhere when you're not achieving anything. I'm not just saying that to be smart; it happens to be a truth. Let's talk about achievement for a moment. If you want to achieve something, then obviously you have some ambition. If you have ambition, it's driven by desire, and you’re not going to go anywhere while you're full of desire because desires are the very things that will keep you away from any inner peace or contentment, or ability to sit with yourself. Most people cannot even bear to spend an hour with themselves; they're just full of all kinds of agitations, all sorts of desires, things like ‘go and do some shopping,’ ‘go and meet my friend,’ ‘go and have a coffee,’ or whatever it is.
These achievements or desires are very, very, varied. One person may have a desire for peace, and so they go off and learn meditation, will meditation bring peace? Well, yes, while you're meditating certainly, you can experience some very, very nice states. But within ten to fifteen minutes of coming out of it, and somebody's run a key down the side of your car, you probably won’t be feeling all t
hat peaceful. Some people are devotional, they want to give themselves to some bigger entity somehow. I'm not decrying these things, and it's a very noble thing to do, but will they get there just by feeling that? I don't think so, they might do, but we're back to desires. While you have the desire to do that, you're not going to get there. In fact, a common theme that runs through all the undertakings and the accounts of what saints have achieved is that they all say pretty much the same thing; until the desires are subdued, there's no point trying to do anything, even meditating. Of course, a lot of people go into it with some goal in view when they meditate. They want to experience peace, or maybe they even want to experience Samadhi, or whatever. Are they going to experience that? With some desire driving it absolutely not, it's the nature of the beast. The thing that drives us into these things is the very thing that will stop us from achieving anything. And then you get people who read lots of books, I've certainly been guilty of that. If you’re a book reader, you go from Kabbalah to Zen to Buddhism to esoteric Christianity to Gnosticism to whatever. You will read and know books on chakras and books on meditation and the next book is always the one that will do it. The next book is always the one that's got the key that you need to actually achieve something. And of course, as we just stated, achievement is equal to ambition and ambition is equal to desire. So, are you actually going to get anything when you're driven like that? No, you're not. Then you get all the kind of self-help stuff, making positive affirmations and visualizations and all that kind of thing. Which, if anything was the work of the anti-Christ, because all they're doing is firing up desires so that people get into an even more frantic state. Many people have to go down to the gym for two hours every day to try and burn it off.
I started with saying that what brings you into spiritual work or work on self is the very thing that will stop you. How on earth do you work against that tendency? Well of course ‘you’ cannot work against it, this is where you need outside help. Here are a few notes on finding a teacher, and the word ‘teacher’ is very, very over-rated. Most of the people who are involved in this have got their own battles going on, but maybe they know a bit more then you, and if they are a real teacher, they will learn from you. It won't be that they are the fountain of all knowledge and you are some dumb ass. There will be some learning on behalf of the teacher and hopefully some learning on behalf of the guy who’s trying to learn from the teacher. But here's a few bits of advice. One is that you need never, ever, ever, ever tolerate any coercion or abusive behavior, just never, ever accept it. For example, if part of the school you're involved with means dancing crazily around the floor with everybody else and you don't want to do it, then you need to feel OK about not doing it. If there's somebody there that tries to make you feel bad because you're not joining in, then walk out. Tell them to go fuck themselves. So, allow no form of coercion. A lot of people put Gurdjieff up on a pedestal. Gurdjieff ruined a lot of people's lives. If you've read the book by Fritz Peters, who was a small boy when he met Gurdjieff, and as soon as Gurdjieff took him under his wing Gurdjieff said go out and mow that lawn in an hour. It was a large lawn, so Fritz Peters went out and cut the grass and eventually got it down to an hour. When he had done that, Gurdjieff would say well go and mow those two lawns in an hour. So, this little kid was getting all anxious and felt he had to do it because he felt that by doing these things he pleased the one adult that he had in his life - and of course, when he grew up he's totally messed up with multiple nervous breakdowns, and all kinds of psychological problems.
So, yes, to go back to the teacher, do not ever, ever, ever work with a teacher that is any way coercive. Do not work with someone who is filling you up with bullshit. You need to be emptied out, not filled up. So, if someone is providing a way for you to see stuff within yourself and by discovering it you start to defuse the intensity of it, then that's good work. But if you've got someone who's filling you up with all kinds of theories - you should do this, and you should do that and whatever, walk out because it's not the way it works.
Unfortunately, the literature today is full of all kinds of heroic nonsense. This kind of work is not heroic; it's very, very gentle, it's very subtle, it’s very light. If it's not gentle, subtle and light and above all non-violent, then basically go and find somebody else. The main work is to put everything that is going on within you under the spotlight of consciousness, and I've talked about self-observation, which is essentially the primary way that you do work. Unfortunately, it does involve some trips into what you might call ‘hell.’ Jacob Boehme, the middle ages Christian mystic said, and he was right, if you want to get to heaven then you have to travel through hell. Well, what is hell? Hell is all the stuff within you that you are in denial of. And I'm aware that I’ve said things that might be challenging for some people, but you have to take that journey through all the things within you that have been repressed, and you have to take the journey through the world, through both the horrors and the delights. In truth, they're both the same thing, and you have to see it all. That requires a lot of bravery and some preparation. The bottom line is that the point you need to get to is the point where when you work you are not achieving anything, and you're not achieving anything because you have no desire to achieve anything. What is there to achieve? Achievement and desire just a cover over what you are, which is essentially calm, unadulterated being.
ON HAVING NO PURPOSE
Purpose is a human invention. The universe has no purpose and is eternally free.
Goal-oriented people who try to cover their inner emptiness with constant activity and positive thinking may not find this section particularly interesting. I suggest you skip forward now if that is your mindset. We're going to be talking about purpose and as the title suggests, there is no purpose to the universe or in fact anything. Purpose is a purely human construction and most people fabricate a purpose. They create a purpose because it allows them to constantly be involved in activity so that they avoid sinking down into themselves to see what's there and all the horrors that might exist there. So before I get into this whole thing of purpose I need to talk about the nature of the universe, God or Nature, whatever word you want to use, because we don't know what nature, the universe or God is. And in fact that kind of negative statement is a liberating thing and hopefully you'll see why in a moment.
Firstly let me say that we perceive the universe through our five senses. It's a wholly inadequate representation. It's one that to a large extent our brain creates for us and so when we think we know the universe because we're a part of it and we look out into the skies, look at trees and we look at all the things that are happening around us, we think that somehow we know the universe. But we don't. What we actually know are two things. We know the world of physicality - the world of three dimensions and time. That's the way we perceive the world and if you've ever read Kant you'll know that he says that time and space are properties of our consciousness. They're not properties of what's out there. Now even if you forget all the philosophy and you turn to physics, which is something that I studied for several years when I was a young man, you'll find that the universe is not what it appears. Einstein for example had to treat the world as a four-dimensional object to derive his theory of relativity, special relativity particularly. And special relativity says things like, if someone travels away from you at a very high velocity near the speed of light then their time will move much more slowly than yours and possibly when they get back they might have aged by, let's say a month, but you might have aged by 50 years. It's not intuitive is it? And it was a great work by Einstein to figure all that out. It's all proved, there's no doubt about this happening. On jet airplanes that travel around the world the clocks have to be adjusted every now and then because they are traveling at a reasonable, although not particularly high speed compared to the speed of light, but it's enough just to make small difference on the clocks and so they have to be adjusted.
We don't really know what this physical world is. Quant
um mechanics tells us that things never really exist until we look at them. And I'm not going to get into all the philosophical debate around all that, but strange things happen in quantum mechanics. Things can appear where they shouldn't appear. There's a whole realm of strange behavior there as well. It's now believed that 95% of the universe consists of matter that we cannot detect at all. It's called dark matter and dark energy. And what we call empty space has a mass, it weighs something. Empty space weighs something. Physics shows us that the whole universe is a lot weirder and stranger then we can ever imagine it to be, and as we look further it gets stranger and weirder. And this is just the world of physical things. Then we get to the world of thought which is the other world that we inhabit - the world of thought and consciousness. And that too we hardly know. We hardly know it in the main because we remain at a superficial level of consciousness and awareness. Our ideas and our thoughts, for most of us anyway, don't go beyond thinking about our career, our partners, our hobbies, our holidays, whatever it is that occupies our mind most of the time. Ideas about the nature of the universe such as the ones I've expressed, broaden our horizon a little bit. We need these ideas because they liberate us from our own little prison - our own little self-made hell that is a result of our animal nature. Our primary drive is to survive, which means that we focus on earning money, mating and making sure that everything is, as far as possible, secure and safe. That's what we do most of the time. And life doesn't allow us to exist in a wholly safe state because we're all going to die at some point, and most of us are going to become ill, and maybe our partner will leave or whatever else might happen in life. All these things do not allow us to really sit safely in our own little cocoon and so we become neurotic. Let's not pretend that we understand what nature or the universe is because the universe has many, many, many dimensions and I'm not talking about dimensions of space and time. We know thoughts and consciousness and we know physical reality. And that's it. But there is no reason why there might not be infinite of these modes of existence, and we know nothing about the rest of them. Physics tries to give us a bit of a view on it because string theory for example, which is the favorite candidate to create a theory of everything, postulates eleven dimensions. Totally beyond our imagination, it's purely mathematics, but even there at the end of the day we're talking about eleven dimensions in the physical universe.
The Corporeal Fantasy Page 15