Before I begin I should state that I continue to think using the Fourth Way Structure of the Universe and Man and find it increasingly worth using. When I read other authors it is clear that they are all saying the truth but most of those truths seem to be applicable only to certain areas of human understanding. Everything works in the right context. Nothing works out of place. Most things only apply in particular contexts. That is how intricately connected everything is.
There are two areas I continue to wonder about. One is the road between knowledge and being and the other, related to this one, the mechanism with which people justify what they do after they’ve done it. I mean both of these aspects in a big way.
When I think of the road from knowledge to being what comes to mind is that individuals are born, grow up, accumulate a certain amount of knowledge about the world and what their own imaginary picture of themselves is. That “picture” or “image” is much defined by her or his entourage and they also make a picture of what they would like to become, the kind of person they’d like to be… and then what happens? How do individuals “bridge” that interval between what they are in a given moment of time and what they would like to be? The areas can be multiple from being poor to being rich or being violent to being patient and soft or being fat to getting thin. Is WILL the only necessary ingredient between the initial and final version of one’s self? So what is really a human being if he or she never, ever, really poses him or herself the question of changing anything? Are there such people?
I think one of the most difficult ideas by Gurdjieff is that Man is a Machine. It is certainly the one I’ve most hated after the cult experience because the cult made “machines” of the members, that is, “automatons at its service” and the inevitable conclusion today is that we were already too talented considering how easy it managed to almost solidify us into that mold.
When I speak of the road from knowledge to being, I’m understanding knowledge not only as the sum total of what individuals know with their mind but as the sum total of their knowledge of the world whether it is “conscious” or “unconscious” knowledge. This is what I’m interested in exploring because the more I look at my self and others, the clearer it becomes that there’s truly very little that is absolutely “individual”. Many questions arise from there:
Should there be anything totally individual? What would that be?
What is really “I” in that sense? I mean, what is really that individualistic that it can be called “I” that is not intrinsically connected to others, including people and things?
Are people “free” of everything else? Is that freedom?
The individualistic philosophy of life so common today seems to conceive that freedom is total independence from others but for me freedom is total connection to others, connectedness without barriers, conscious and grateful for the dependence and at the same time still freely one’s self. What then is one’s self? What is freedom in that dependence? How “free” is it really?
If we take a look at the individual from the point of view of the centers where can we see individuality?
In the instinctive centre? Could there be any true independence from the world in the instinctive centre when death would be the result after just a few days of not drinking and eating?
In the moving centre, are individuals most independent from others in the sphere of movement? Gravity of course would be the great law under which movement submits but certainly others do not have to move one for one to move and yet how true is it that we are free in movement? Do we not copy the way our parents moved almost exactly? Stand as ugly or beautifully as they did? Use the same gestures? Parents, teachers? Or those we loved and admired that we joyfully tried to imitate? Is that individualism? Independence? Freedom? And from there to choosing to move as one would like to move, not as one unconsciously copied as a child, what is required? What will? What knowledge?
In the emotional centre, where is our freedom? Where our individualism? Is it in the fact that the things that happened to each one of us that determined how we “felt” about our selves and others happened only to us, to me, to each one of us and nobody else? Would the individualistic aspect of our emotional world then be the most individualistic aspect of our life? The one that determines who, how and why we fall in love the way we do, who, how and why we listen and try to connect with? And yet, are we not much determined by the way our parents themselves felt about their own self and the world around them? Did their inner feelings not come to us as attitudes that we adopted without ever asking or knowing why? When a child is terrified of dogs don’t we often find that his mother slowly and steadily implanted that fear in the child? But then, aren’t so many such “inclinations” unconsciously implanted in us by our parents or those around us, in childhood? The food we like and why we like it, the clothes, the people, the decoration, the books, the films, the things we like to do?
How much then are we exactly determined? Where is the freedom in that determination and would freedom mean giving it all up and throwing it out the window? Could we ever? Would we want to?
In the intellectual centre could we say it is the most private and individualistic aspect of our lives? Do our thoughts really belong to us? How could we ever explain then that a person in a cult is brainwashed in just a couple of weeks? That people’s own thoughts are so incipient that they’ll adopt someone else’s ideas about the world in amazingly short periods of time?
But is that really the case? I mean, do people take on a cult and its dogma in seconds because of the heart and mind’s proclivity to think and feel as others or because what ever we call the “I” of the individual in that moment in time is so inclined to “participate” in the community that it will dismantle his or her own inner “models” to adopt the new one’s presented by the cult?
This is interesting because what cults have proven is that it is possible to dismantle one’s inner models and replace them for others. In cults this is done using the “will” of the member against their own selves for the cult’s profit but what then could it mean to dismantle one’s inner conditioned models and reconstruct one’s self according to one’s self? According to one’s own choices?
And if we are so fond of adopting “models” to live by, what is the ideal “model” that one would want to adopt?
I’ll continue to tackle these questions in future posts.
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