To get back to the main point, what I'm saying is that by denying yourself the expectation of a reward you are also insulating yourself from disappointment. You don't have to do this, but you must ask yourself, what am I doing my work for, my psychological or spiritual work or whatever you want to call it, what am I doing it for? Ultimately you want joy, peace, contentment, forget about enlightenment. Enlightenment is some silly myth, at least the popular notion of it. The popular notion being that we inhabit some alternative state of consciousness where everything is fine and dandy, but it's not really at all. Well, I've never seen it anyway, and I've met quite a few people in the kind of work that I've done.
Since we want happiness and to experience peace and to be joyful then we don't want negative emotions. We don't want the passions would be a correct phrase to use; we don't want the passions grabbing us by the neck every day because something has gone wrong, or because someone has done something that upsets us. We have no control whatsoever, over either ourselves or what is happening in external life. I know people will probably disagree with the first part of that, but, you don't have any control over yourself. It's ridiculous to think that you have a will that can control what you do. Since you have no control over these things, it's best to regard them as things that are not particularly important. With your health, for example. You have no control over whether this time next week or tomorrow you might be struck down with some illness that's quite debilitating and so on. If you can say to yourself ‘I don't want health, it doesn't affect me,’ then when poor health comes along, you're not going to be devastated as many people are. It goes against the grain, for example, to say I don't care about good health. It goes against the grain because at the center of every one of us is a life-affirming desire to live and to have a certain amount of power. By saying something that contradicts that, it offends something very deep within us. This life-affirming thing that is within us does not work for our benefit; it works for the benefit of nature in general. And before I get myself into water that is too deep, I think I'll finish this.
COMPASSION FOR SELF
Here we are, thrust into an existence we do not understand, and with a death sentence hanging over our heads. For most of us, the will-to-life is tyrannical, causing us to strive to maintain our existence at almost any cost. This is the cause of anxiety and much suffering – a “vale of tears” as it is called in the Bible. This is not an exercise in self-pity, but just an objective statement of the facts. I could go on, but you get the picture.
If we can really see our situation, and that of all other creatures, then we need to mitigate its effects if we are not to be at the mercy of random circumstances that might either work for us or against us. An essential ingredient in this mitigation is self-compassion. I repeat this is not self-pity. We want to reduce our suffering, not increase it, and self-pity would surely increase our suffering. Self-compassion is wholly different.
To have compassion for self means we understand that we live in a seemingly indifferent universe and that it is our task to make our lives as pleasant as possible. This is the greatness of Spinoza. He wrote his magnus opus, The Ethics, with the stated aim of helping humankind reduce its “sad passions” – it was a work of great compassion. And so we too need to work to reduce the “sad passions” in our lives. To bring pleasure into our lives is not an invitation to indulgence, this will only bring pain – sooner or later. It simply means we find activities that bring us pleasure and focus on those. Spinoza claims that the only real pleasure is that of understanding. For myself, this is certainly a major component in creating a pleasurable life, but it isn’t the only thing. I enjoy meditation, relaxation and other things that reduce the harmful effects on my psyche created by the ever-present will-to-life.
Out of compassion for self we can make efforts to understand ourselves and the world. This understanding will, on its own, bring relief from suffering. We should not live a life governed by the incessant desires produced by the will-to-life. And I should add that subtlety is needed here. We cannot control or dominate in any way the will-to-life as it manifests through us. But we can observe it and give it expression while understanding it and seeking short breaks from endless desiring. This would be an act of self-compassion. This is the best we can do, but the benefits are enormous. Instead of being an unconscious slave of the will-to-life we become a conscious slave, and so there is something of our own in there.
To live a life without compassion for self is a tragedy – a life lived as a “thing” as Gurdjieff would say. Don’t live the life of a thing. You owe it to yourself to understand your own nature and that of the world and to take time out from the incessant demands of the will-to-life
ON MAKING NO EFFORT
One of the most difficult things to achieve in this life is to give up on effort. And yes, I’m aware there is a paradox buried in that statement, but paradox is the engine of truth. In any case, by the time we become young adults we have learned that the only way to achieve anything is through effort – school, work, seduction, physical training, and so on. As I have mentioned many times, virtually all our efforts are driven by the will-to-life or survival instinct. And so, we make efforts to earn money, secure shelter, buy food, find a mating partner, become part of a social group, maintain our health, and a hundred other things that serve to keep us alive and provide an environment for rearing offspring. And if we had no reflective consciousness, we would behave like other animals and only strive to exist and raise our young, and then die.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you view it, we do have a reflective consciousness, and so we can look at our life and ask whether we merely want to be a slave to nature, driven by desires, and suffering the emotions that are a result of these desires being fulfilled or otherwise. Once we have identified desire to be the root cause of our suffering, and that all desires derive from the desire to live, then we can make efforts to understand these desires, the emotions, and how we might be less affected by them. But there is a twist. All effort comes from the beast, the will-to-life, without exception. And since we are mainly beast, so we have a hard time understanding how we might free ourselves from its tyranny. Various sages and philosophers have indicated what we need to do, although even the word “do” is loaded with the desire. Gurdjieff said we should let our non-desires dominate our desires. Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching says things like – the grass makes no effort to grow, or a storm has no fixed schedule or timescale. Many Gurdjieff groupies interpret his statement to mean they should do things they do not want to do, but to do these things they ultimately have to convince themselves that they do want to do them, and so the result is not a non-desire. Non-desire is no desire. We should let no desire dominate desire. Unfortunately, our language does not help here. For example, the only way we can express the opposite of doing, is by saying non-doing. Non-desire, non-doing, and by implication no-effort is where we should go, but oh dear, the word “go” implies action. Seems like we are in a trap since we can only think in terms of doing, of effort, of goals and preferred states. And so, we find people chasing after enlightenment, moksha, mindfulness and any number of other seemingly preferred states.
Fortunately, nature cannot hide its intentions and its deceptions. Its most obvious deception is the inbuilt sentiment that every creature has, that it is the center of the universe. This leads inevitably to a sense of self-importance, and each creature experiences itself as the only thing that matters in the world. It should be evident that none of us have some vital role to play, the world will get along fine without us. Nothing we think, nothing we do, nothing we feel, or any purpose we may think we have, is the least bit important. It is essential that we realize nothing is important, including this statement. This is our get out of jail card. At the times when we think we have discovered the secret to freedom, how to be happy, that we understand how everything works, or merely the expectation that some new practice or knowledge is going to set us free, we can remember that it is
not the least bit important. Apparently, the ego does not like this, and so there is likely to be resistance. But if you remember that the resistance is also not important, and that your so-called efforts are not important, then you may indeed get a taste of inner freedom. So, here’s a list of things we can do, none of which are important, and which might help us abandon the addiction to effort.
Nothing is important, including the idea that nothing is important.
It is not the least bit important that you should recognize when you have a gaining idea. The idea of gain is our default mechanism for doing things. When you see you have attached some idea of gain to an action, just acknowledge it and move on. Do not try to resist the gaining idea, because then you only create another gaining idea.
Do not resist anything within yourself. If you see ambition in yourself in the work environment, or ambition in your play, or ambition in your relationships with others, just observe it and let it be. To resist these things would mean that you take them seriously and that you have decided that there is a preferred state. There is never a state that is preferable to the state you are in right here and now.
Finally, remember that all effort comes from the will-to-life. If you see yourself making efforts, then just observe them and move on. To make efforts to try and eliminate effort is the ultimate folly.
This is tricky work, but I have found in my experience that the constant remembrance of my own nothingness, and that nothing I think, or feel is the least bit important to me or anyone else, usually breaks the logjam of emotions and thoughts that crowd our inner world. But breaking the logjam isn’t important either. Finally, a word from Lao Tzu:
‘A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.'
But Lao Tzu isn’t important either.
The Corporeal Fantasy Page 23