February 11, 2010
- Jacob Needleman on Gurdjieff -
Man, Gurdjieff taught, is an undeveloped creation. He is not really man, considered as a cosmically unique being whose intelligence and power of action mirror the energies of the source of life itself. On the contrary, man as we encounter him is an automaton. His thoughts, feelings, and deeds are little more than mechanical reactions to external and internal stimuli. He cannot do anything. In and around him, everything happens without the participation of his own authentic consciousness. But human beings are ignorant of this state of affairs because of the pervasive influence of culture and education, which engrave in them the illusion of autonomous conscious selves. In short, man is asleep. There is no authentic I am in his presence, but only an egoism which masquerades as the authentic self, and whose machinations poorly imitate the normal human functions of thought, feeling, and will.
from here
(emphasis mine, such a beautiful way of phrasing it)
Many factors reinforce this sleep. Each of the reactions that proceed in one’s presence is accompanied by a deceptive sense of I—man is many I’s, each imagining itself to be the whole, and each buffered off from awareness of the others. Each of these many I’s represents a process whereby the subtle energy of consciousness is absorbed and degraded, a process that Gurdjieff termed “identification.” Man identifies—that is, squanders his conscious energy, with every passing thought, impulse, and sensation. This state of affairs takes the form of a continuous self-deception and a continuous procession of egoistic emotions, such as anger, self-pity, sentimentality, and fear which are of such a pervasively painful nature that man is constantly driven to ameliorate this condition through the endless pursuit of social recognition, sensory pleasure, or the vague and unrealizable goal of “happiness.”
Comment by Ian — February 11, 2010 @ 1:39 pm
According to Gurdjieff, the human condition cannot be understood apart from considering humanity within the function of organic life on earth. The human being is constructed to transform energies of a specific nature, and neither his potential inner development nor his present actual predicament is understandable apart from this function.
Comment by Ian — February 11, 2010 @ 1:44 pm
With an ever-diminishing “I,” man gathers an ever-expanding corpus of information about the universe.
Comment by Ian — February 11, 2010 @ 2:14 pm
Like the founders of every great spiritual path, he sought to awaken rather than to indoctrinate. The course of his life as teacher does not follow the logic of an individual seeking merely to spread a doctrine.
Comment by Ian — February 11, 2010 @ 2:59 pm
This is kind of why I don’t want to get a traditional “job.” Because jobs exist with or without me. I just plug into them. It doesn’t require any creativity or initiative on my part. I just become an anonymous cog in a machine.
It takes conscious will to carve out your own niche as a writer, artist or entrepreneur, you know? or some type of genius or something.
Working a job it becomes less obvious how hard this is, all your needs are provide for, you have structure to fall in line with even your “free time” takes in the structure of the job.
Its even better to be a total loser, like a homeless bum, in a way by drawing attention to the fact that there is this big machine and if you don’t fit into it you lose out.
Ideally though, my goal is to carve out a nich by creating something for myself from nothing. That takes conscious will. That’s my goal and to the degree that I haven’t reached it I see the rightness of Gurdjieff’s proposition.
If I were a manager of the claims department of a major insurance company(which I could be right now, if I hadn’t quit) maybe I wouldn’t see that.
Comment by Ted — February 11, 2010 @ 6:29 pm
Gurdjieff believed most of us are food, also. That’s what… “According to Gurdjieff, the human condition cannot be understood apart from considering humanity within the function of organic life on earth. The human being is constructed to transform energies of a specific nature, and neither his potential inner development nor his present actual predicament is understandable apart from this function.”…means.
Comment by Ted — February 11, 2010 @ 6:33 pm
Good quote, but a bit pessimistic, methinks. Yes, a lot of people spend a lot of time like this. But I think most spend some time above It. And some seem to rise above It quite often. Thing is, we can always see past It if we just know where to look.
[... there's a quote from Pratchett floating up into my mind, something like, 'he couldn't see it, for the same reason that a man standing in the middle of London can't see England.' ...]
*
Similarly there are aspects of employment that don’t involve vampirism. But you have to have your wits about you to find them.
Comment by speedbird — February 12, 2010 @ 7:39 am
@ Ted, re: Gurdjieff thought of us as food.
Actually, Gurdjieff thought of our consciousness and awareness as a kind of food, the food of impressions. And the things that feed on our awareness when we didn’t use it lived on the moon. They’re a kind of ant people. Heh. I love metaphors.
Actually, one way to take this is that what we give our attention to is what we feed our selves, and so its what we build our self out of. Either we eat can our life and grow stronger, or our life can eat us and we grow weaker.
@speedbird re: a bit pessimistic
Yeah, I get you. I think Gurdjieff early on decided to over emphasize the anxiety creating side of the equation, in order to get people moving more quickly. One thing I always have to remind myself is that he was working with intellectuals during the early 1900′s. QUITE a different social mindset than the people nowadays.
Yeah, definitely. And actually, I’d say it also depends on how we react to the situation. I used to think of my job as really vampiric, but as soon as I started exerting some influence on the environment and started doing both the job’s work and my work at the same time (render unto Caesar…) the environment on the job became a lot more nourishing. Granted, I work for a pretty great company and so this is probably wouldn’t be true of working at an insurance agency, but still, wage labor doesn’t necessarily mean being bled dry.
Comment by Ian — February 12, 2010 @ 12:17 pm
I don’t think working a job is totally unpleasant. I also don’t think there is no way you can show a personal touch or initiative. You can.
I just think that most jobs don’t require you to be conscious. There seems to be a pattern of corporations, in a desire to improve efficiency, to remove consciousness from the equation. Probably the smaller the company the more conscious input is needed. Probably a correlation there.
Still its not really that that’s so unpleasant. Its just that its easy to coast through life that way while having your needs taken care of.
Working for yourself is harder. So far I haven’t been able to pull it off, becauase I have been too lazy and undisciplined. But I could be just as lazy working for a corporation, but it would be easier to delude myself that I am a success in life and that I have a conscious will.
Still though, there are industry standards and regulations to follow even as an entrapreneur that spell things out for you.
So say the next guy down is a free lance artist or a writer. Its pretty much all his initiative that puts food on his table. He is even more carving out his niche for himself. But there is a continuum. Perhaps maybe most people are “artisans” that just immitate others and stay within an existing genre. Maybe he is a bit of a hack.
So the next house down, same income level same home value, is a true Artist. He is an original. He is a trail blazer. He is throwing new shit at people. No one is showing him the way. No one is spelling everything out for him ahead of time. He operates entirely from conscious will. He takes great risks in everything he does.
I want to be that guy. Right now I am just a bum. I admit it.
Comment by Ted — February 12, 2010 @ 2:24 pm
I deleted a paragraph somehow. The analogy was neighbours with similar houses and income levels, one is a middle manager for a corporation. He just does what he is told fairly competantly and efficiently. The next house is a small bussiness owner that calls all the shots and carves out his own niche
One requires much more conscious will than the other. I think A true artist, an original, would require most conscious will and greatest risk.
Comment by Ted — February 12, 2010 @ 2:30 pm
yeah, I like that.
Comment by Ian — February 12, 2010 @ 2:54 pm
When I take steps to do things related to being a free lance writer/artist, I experience resistance. Why is that?
What is resisting?
Comment by Ted — February 12, 2010 @ 3:25 pm
Hmm. I dunno.
For me, I’ve always thought it was my job, causing an inability to focus on long term projects because my mind’s always needed elsewhere, but that’s not the case for you.
But I dunno. Back in college, I had bunches of free time, and still no productivity.
What got me going for a little while was a book called The Artist’s Way. It worked for me, while I was doing it, and it’s certainly unlocked some sort of creativity in me (and actually, I’ve been planning a series of art posts for next week, so stay tuned!)
But I think part of it could maybe be too much conscious will! Art needs to be wooed slowly, and joyfully. Maybe you’re forcing it too hard?
I recommend the book, its a tweleve week program, but the heart of it is two things:
1) first thing upon waking up every morning, sit a write three pages in a notebook. This applies no matter what kind of art you are doing, and you basically just need to force yourself to get down three pages of anything. Even if its just three pages of “this is boring this is boring”, which I definitely did on occasion. This helps immensely more than one would think it does.
2) once a week, you take the artist inside you on an “artist date”. Kind of silly language, maybe, but the point is to do something to fill the creative well within you. It can’t be with anyone else, but you can do pretty much anything, as long as the purpose is to feel excited and creative. Examples are going to buy some artsupplies, going to a gallery opening or music show. One of my first “artist dates” was to take my camera and spend a day wandering around Roosevelt Island, taking pictures. Not to make a living at it, not for any purpose other than just to take pictures.
That’s my thoughts on the matter. Creativity becomes harder the more we try to force it to happen for reasons other than it simply happening. Hope that helps, and definitely check out that book. Did wonders for me.
Comment by Ian — February 12, 2010 @ 4:42 pm
And then I go on tumblr and find this:
“A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.”
Comment by Ian — February 12, 2010 @ 4:45 pm
Ian,
You are a genuinely helpful person! Thanks man!
It was kind of a rhetorical question, those are all good tips, though. I’d say I’m over the hump as far as those types of exercises, but the book looks worth checking out. I don’t think I have Artists block. I have a time management block. a self discipline block.
Gurdjieff’s words are coming to life before me, seriously. I have lots of little selves that want to fuck around all day. They rear their ugly heads, whenever I work on goals.
my life is not my own as much as I would like. I needed to quit my job too see this. I have all the free time in the world now.
Thanks for the tips, though. That was very thoughtful.
Comment by Ted — February 12, 2010 @ 5:17 pm
Hey, thanks Ted. Glad to hear you don’t consider writer’s block to be a problem, that’s not an easy thing for most people (myself included) to get around.
I’d say the book would definitely help with disciple problems as well. I didn’t need much help with that aspect when I picked up the book, but I was coming out of a bad breakup and had plenty of free time and the desire to have something, anything else to think about.
And as far as Gurdjieff’s many “I”s, there’s a saying of his that I really like, and I think it might be helpful with this as well. It was something along the lines of “Take a small thing that you want to do but cannot, and make it your god.”
For me, I wanted to save up some money, cause I was sick of living paycheck to paycheck, but rather than doing too much at once, I decided to simply stopped eating out for breakfast and lunch. It was something I’d always meant to do, something I thought would be a good idea and not too difficult, but for whatever reason I couldn’t ever actually do it. It wasn’t until I promised myself I would do it no matter what, until I “made it my God” to be followed above all other things/desires that I was able to do it.
Stories like this are pretty common on the “self-improvement/mastery” blog circuit, I guess, but the key aspect of it, which I’d never really grasped until I read the Gurdjieff quote, is that it has to be something that should be easy to do, but for whatever reason isn’t easy for you to do. That’s what seems to make the difference. And then just keep doing that over and over. Disciple, as I was once told, is doing what we want to do, especially when we don’t feel like doing it. But its like a muscle, the more you build it up one place, the easier it is to develop it elsewhere. :)
Comment by Ian — February 13, 2010 @ 10:45 am
Yeah, that makes sense. I’ll try it and let you know what happens. I want to write 4 hours a day.
Comment by ted — February 13, 2010 @ 11:48 am
Awesome man, go for it. And let me know!
Comment by Ian — February 13, 2010 @ 2:23 pm