(The perennial stream: Eckhart, nothingness, and the Absolute)
Gurdjieff himself called the Great Knowledge, “the powerful ancient stream of knowledge of being,” or what is more commonly known as the perennial wisdom. If there is one discernible and overriding idea that emerges through all of the ferment and questioning and searching—one idea that survives the manifold and varied experiencings and insights that I have touched on in the following pages—I believe it is still the Eckhartian understanding that all mediation must be alien to God, or better yet, alien to the Supreme Principle, the Absolute. Inextricably related to this is Eckhart’s profound understanding that the ground of things is nothingness, the abyss of the Godhead. This is the unfolding reality that informs what I have written.
came to a clearer understanding of the implications of non-dualism; the reality of the Godhead as distinct from the Creator; and the evident need in the great scheme of things for what I have come to understand as “instruments of the spirit.”
Introduction
(Free attention as the threshold of the real)
So I see that I need an attention that isn’t taken, isn’t captured, isn’t fragmented—an attention that is free. And of course I need to see all the ways in which I allow the attention to be taken. So instead of resorting to some old trick, or leaning on some tired old hand-me-down axiom of the spiritual endeavor, I take in the impression of myself here now, in this place, in this moment, without comment, as impartially as I am able. This is the threshold, if I am to come to something real. I must begin to question all of my habits. But first, to see them. I have nothing to prove, nothing to achieve; rather, I allow this burden of my conditioning to ease, to lighten. I need to be emptied of me and mine, and for that I need to be still, not allowing the attention to be taken and taken too far. And so, in a miniscule way, there is already a new movement in me—a movement towards unity. The body “materializes” without my “doing,” not only because there is space but primarily because there is someone there to observe it. It begins to take its place, almost tangibly. The mind has quietened, not totally, but it is quieter. And it is linked to the body as it registers the structure and this growing sense of verticality.
If I have remained with this wish, I begin to see that without this new alignment between the head, the body, and the feeling, these higher energies are denied to me. They don’t enter, they can’t enter, into an unconscious piece of meat.
And I need to be emptied of me and mine, emptied of all acquisitiveness.
And so I see the need to keep this inquiry open, to respect the mystery of who I am. I am never done with it. It is really only on such a basis that I can make any serious exploration.
This truly all-seeing blogger added: “That Sinclair poses so many questions and basically unresolved analogies shows that he is sorely lacking in answers that a full-awakened and conscious teacher or leader would surely possess.” May I say that nothing could be more perceptive and truer, and I must commend the blogger for his perspicacity. That crossing to the other shore is not as easily “achieved” as some would claim. It is not something one can “do.”
What’s more, this man wisely counseled that the journey to be undertaken is a “long, laborious, and again, very often painful journey of total self-annihilation and re-creation.” And furthermore, that this self-creation need not be in the image or likeness of “Christ, Krishnamurti, Gurdjieff, Eckhart,” or what have you, “but in the image and likeness of our heavenly Father or our Creator.” Unfortunately, my all-knowing blogger appeared to stop short of the more ultimate metaphysical possibility. And that is really what this present book is about.
(Vertical causality: all creation derives from on High)
And that key understanding is that all of creation comes about through vertical causality. Gurdjieff’s strange-sounding Ray of Creation is no less than a comprehensive model of vertical causality. All of creation—and one must believe that in a universe of infinite potentiality there are perhaps other rays of creation, not just the one in which we have our roots—derives from on High, just as all possibilities come from a source far beyond ordinary life. This understanding is known and shared among all the great traditions. It is nothing that Gurdjieff invented, but it is something that he has conveyed with great creativity and rare insight.
But we can conceive and accept as a metaphysical certainty that, no matter how creation is manifested, the Absolute is at the source.
Or, as it is expressed in Islam, “no generation will come upon you that is not followed by a worse.” 5 Everything runs down, everything will end in dissolution.
And so, in the great procession of energies that proceeds from the Absolute and that is, it would seem, destined for entropy, we humans find ourselves in a very dark place in the universe. We are under a great number of laws that constrain our freedom and our ability to “do.”
have brought us the knowledge that in the very act of creation itself there is a loss of perfection; we are no longer whole, we are no longer at the level of that primordial source.
They are made known through the compassion, the “all-lovingness,” of the Creator in sending what Gurdjieff calls Messengers from Above. It is they who carry the knowledge and the understanding of our true situation and reveal to us the measures that are needed for that return. They come from very high, perhaps as close to the Source as one can conceive.
Presence, then one is also unable to perform actions opposed to one’s true understanding. Of course, at the level at which we find ourselves, this contact and this freedom is rarely for more than an instant—perhaps even a nanosecond. This is, nevertheless, an extraordinary possibility—a possibility of which I have hinted in other places—to be open to the formless, to the unknown transforming force, something totally contrary to one’s own inconsequential and egoistic ambition.
Evidently, there is in us a need and a wish for this return. It would seem to be in the nature of things that the One who incarnates in the multiplicity of things has an inherent need to restore, or return to, the primordial unity.
Michel de Salzmann, in turn, brought the extraordinary thought that it is the community that must save the savior, the teacher. And when one works, one feels that the struggle to maintain the Work is willed by the very Source. It is demanded in the vast exchange of energies for which the cosmos is evidently intended. These are terribly deep questions.
The aim is not to be a teacher and perhaps not even to be a student, but to be a real human being, in order to open to the successive degrees in which this I Am can be present in me. I have not said it very clearly, but in the Eastern Orthodox Church of Gurdjieff’s youth there is this understanding of a procession of energies that proceeds from the Creator. This takes place on many levels, perhaps infinite levels, and at the same time this Presence is as near as my skin. More accurately, it is in one’s very marrow. But it is we (mortals) who are not attuned to the call to open to this Presence. So the call has no action in us.
There is such a disparity—in fact, no real common ground—between our mental discourse about these ideas and our actual experiential engagement with them. I discover anew the extraordinary contrast between the awareness of “a life without beginning or end” and the reality of where I actually am. This recognition has to be ever-present in the way we speak and act. And it is this immersion in the work for both consciousness and will that brings the parts into a new alignment and puts one in question. It is only then that one is in front of the unknown, open to the Higher.
In this state of unknowing, of being in question, my parts are aligned, “mobilized,” in a way that enables this new receptivity to the reality of Presence, which is not an abstraction. Presence gives the guidance. Presence is the Teacher.
It is at this point that I must point to a belated recognition—that this seeming certitude about the I Am as the underpinning of the return to the Source needs to be superseded by a yet more subtle understanding. The I Am is not the (absolute) Absolute. And God, for all his ubiquity and transcendence, as I try to reason in the pages that follow, is still only the “agent” of the Absolute.
One experiences the I Am at different levels, in a vast spectrum or range of actuality. The I Am encompasses the entire scale of being from the finest to the densest. There is no “other.” One senses then the depth to the reality of Gurdjieff’s understanding when reflecting on his father’s death, that “I am Thou.”
One can experience, especially but not exclusively in sittings, that a certain alignment can appear through one’s active participation but only if there is no attempt at “doing.” In that moment, the attunement, the receptivity, is there and I can be in touch with something “higher.”
What is the Self that remembers? If it is indeed, as the Great Knowledge indicates, something abiding, something without beginning or end, something at the source of life itself, it must encompass action, it must include our having to manifest.
P: One way the Gurdjieff Work seems to differ from the traditions is that it has no stated ethics or morality, no emphasis on living with compassion, or with nonviolence. How does what is cultivated by the Work look to the rest of the world?
imponderables? FS: Surely not by taking more thought. Instead—and here one speaks ahead of oneself—we are called to turn to the Source, to the Silence at the very core of our being, to the unmanifest that informs all forms. To accept to be in question. And to open to the unknown transforming force.
CHAPTER 3 A Glimpse of the “Outer Darkness”
(Functions recording experience without consciousness)
To all intents and purposes, I was unconscious, unable to speak about, or report on, these impressions—and yet they were being experienced, registered, often with extraordinary clarity, seemingly by some organic intelligence. On reflection, this was to me yet further evidence of the Gurdjieffian axiom that functions can exist without consciousness, and I must infer that each of the “three brains” automatically registered these functional movements.
“At the far limit, where it’s difficult to define the borderline between consciousness and attention, and, no doubt, between the functions and consciousness-will, one could conceive of an all-embracing attention on the basis of which, through successive differentiations, one reaches different levels of manifestation of this power” (emphasis mine).
The second is that these experiences have reinforced for me yet again the need to work for “perfection in the sense of being,” to cite one of Gurdjieff’s “Obligolnian strivings.” That is how the sense of verticality reflects the possibility of, and the need for, a return to the Source. In a strange way, I was able to bear witness to “a something” incorruptible inside, at the center of my poisoned and crippled organism, that was impervious to the forces of disintegration and destruction.
We have to be aligned innerly in another way, around the attention; this would enable us to be receptive to the energies “from on High,” to use his words. That, to me, is the secret, as it were, or the real meaning, of what Mr. Gurdjieff meant when he talked about the need for “the harmonious development of man.” When you first hear that idea you think he must mean that we have to be nice and good and live in harmony with others. But it’s not that; it’s about our lack of being. This is why, it seems, things are in the disorder and disarray that they are. From
According to Gurdjieff, we have been created to serve a very great purpose—to regenerate the fine energies that have been incarnated in the multiple states of the being (to use Guénon’s language), thus enabling them to evolve, that is, to return in varying degrees of “quickening” (to use St. Paul’s term).
It does seem at times that human existence is indeed strange and perhaps even absurd and insane. But to those with conscience, it becomes ever more apparent that life is not about one’s own gratification. Indeed, Gurdjieff evidently said on at least one occasion that “all pleasure is shit.” One begins to fathom the meaning of that through efforts not to be mechanical, not to be asleep, and to accept to be put in question.
How is the human entity constructed and what laws does it obey? We have been constructed with great intelligence, it seems. We were not just thrown together. In some way, behind all this there must be a profound and unknown intelligence. And in order to become more intelligent myself, I need to understand not only how I function, but also how I need to function. Through our sleep and lack of being, we are shut off from that central, overriding intelligence. Undertaking this work of self-study is a way of bringing me into conformity with that intelligence. So it’s a very critical thing to begin to understand more about the laws that govern our lives.
Conscience is a very high energy that comes from a very high source. And it can’t reach me, it can’t act in me, if I’m in a state of inner chaos. It can’t enter.
(Attention as the measure and work of real being)
Gurdjieff always emphasized that one is one’s attention—“I am my attention.” If there’s no attention, then I am merely a thing, an automaton. Gurdjieff once actually said, “If you are not collected, you are just a piece of meat.” He expressed it that bluntly. I am not attentive automatically: I have to work for it. I have to discriminate, I have to not daydream, I have to not just vent my negativity. So this is a work to purify and harmonize the life of my functions.
The notion of the Great Knowledge would imply that behind all the traditions is an indivisible, underlying truth, and that the traditions spring from the same ultimate or primordial source.
FS: No. His teaching is not a new religion. Rather, it is a return to tradition. In fact, people who call it a new religion are really mistaken. His teaching derives from a very ancient understanding. To think otherwise shows how shallow our thinking is. People may consider his teaching to be a new religion, but he did not invent it; he was bringing something deriving from, and related to, a very ancient current of knowledge, and in that sense, it is not opposed to the great traditions. In fact, we can understand the great religions even better when we begin to sense what it is Gurdjieff is calling us to understand.
FS: Yes. I think so. There appears to be a vast and ancient chain or web of relationships. How else could the truth be sustained in the face of all the onslaughts by shallow, secular, interests? How else could the truth survive all the earthly catastrophes of history, both recorded and unrecorded? I believe Gurdjieff was a product of school. He was not merely a sport of nature, but a product of school.
FS: He was, as it is said, “in life.” He made and lost fortunes in the service of his teaching. He wasn’t just lounging around and waiting passively for life to satisfy his needs.
And the fact that he could suffer like any ordinary mortal displayed his total humanity. He suffered, and he was very compassionate because of his own struggles and suffering. He was always helping the poor, helping people who had no money, helping people who had no food. He had an extraordinary generosity and compassion.
(Becoming instruments for the Higher)
What I’ve come to is that we are intended to be instruments for the Higher, or, if you wish, for the I Am.
A certain action takes place. Suddenly the words disappear and something of another mysterious nature actually materializes. There is no true mystical life without experience of the noumenal, of the sacred. And that, to me, is nothing you find in the books, but it’s where the teaching takes one. Mr. Gurdjieff’s teaching is a profound thing.
What I mean is, there are moments in which, suddenly, as it were, all of one’s energies, one’s psychic or functional parts, are aligned in a new order through the attention. How did that happen? And then another energy is able to pass. How did that happen? It’s nothing that we bolt together by design. So there’s the unknown, the mysterious—strictly, the sacred—at work.
But Presence is something extraordinary. It is the outreach, the antennae, if you wish, of the Highest. So that’s really what one aspires to. Then, there’s the mystery of how to be “available,” how to be open, which is what we’re all inquiring into, researching.
Gurdjieff emphasized that the work he conveys is for the harmonious development of man. That central necessity escapes one in all of the dutiful striving for sensation or the “conquest” of negative emotions or in “stopping” thoughts. The work isn’t just about the life of the functions—the thought, the feeling, the instinctive/moving nature—it’s about opening to this other current, this vertical dimension.