Who am I? Why was I born? Why are we here? What am I for?
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SCIENCE - should have
perspective and include the scientist |
First of all, let's be clear about one thing. This "I" in questions like "Why was I born?" is not meant to be about just me, it's meant to be about you, in the way that we all are. It's about me, so to speak, as representative of the human race, like you, like we all are. Have I
anything to say to you? This is about searching to
understand such basic questions - questions often asked by young children and
more or less dismissed by adults. It is about my own experience and struggles
to understand, and about how eventually I found I could not do this on my own
and how with help I found that something really is possible. Such help is possible if and when
a real need in a person meets something real to meet that need. Why do I wish to address you? I wish to write now, from my own experience, concerning some of those questions that can arise on reaching adulthood and using the material obtained to try to decide what to do with one's life. I write concerning ten years' searching, and how this led to something very real for me. I awoke to new horizons, and began to make sense of those questions. I feel I am now at the "foothills of understanding" and in a position where it becomes necessary for me to pass this on to help something crystallize. |
INTRODUCTION: Have I anything to say to you? A view from the foothills - an appointment with nature - and yourself: Do you want to know "the answer"? Why do these things seem so inaccessible? |
A view from the foothills - an appointment with
nature - and yourself:
Picture yourself enjoying taking the
opportunity to temporarily leave behind the hubbub of your daily life. You are
taking a walk up into the natural beauty of the hills. As you ascend, your new
surroundings ease out the various things buzzing in your head. The physical
efforts you are making help you feel more alive. Some way up the mountain you
stop for a rest, and now relaxed take the time to reflect a little.
The further up you climb the better the view.
You look down across all this and recall all those people down there, each with
their personal concerns. You realize that these are similar in nature to the
concerns you had until a short time ago. But up here, you see those concerns
also in a wider perspective, and they do not have the same hold on you.
In moments of clarity I see the sleep, the
hypnosis that we all live in all our lives. I see human beings scurrying round
using lots of energy in this, that, or the other, all blown everywhere by any
passing influence. I see that all this energy is only serving the same purpose
as in animals, basically as in the rest of nature. None of it is directed in
the direction for which, as human beings on this planet, we are uniquely
equipped.
It may be the impact of coming across a wide
expanse of unspoilt countryside, it may be realizing the timelessness of a
gently flowing stream or waves upon a shore. There are times when Life can come
across to each of us in all its purity and simplicity. On the other hand, I
find my life is under influences that I cannot control. Often I resent these
influences, but now I feel remorse for this state of affairs. I feel the
aspiration to function as a human being should function, not as I do. I become
aware of the distant possibility that the creature I am born as should be my
willing servant rather than my master.
From Pot of Gold, Ch'ing-yiian:
Before I had studied Zen for thirty years,
I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more
intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not
mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very
substance I am at rest. For it is just that I see mountains once again as
mountains, and waters once again as waters.
We learn to say "I" all the time,
from a very early age. Imagine for a moment the very first time you ever said
"I", or even recall it in your own children. Part of growing up, yes,
something you learn to do from those close to you. It is something that changes
us for the rest of our lives.
It seems to me that much of our lives
nowadays is designed to satisfy some incessant demand in us to not stop for an
instant. There feels to be some energy driving us along beyond our control in
some never-ending thirst for anything at all - knowledge, information,
progress, money, happiness, anything.
"Well", you may say, "that's
how it is, isn't it? That's the world we live in."
But is that all?
Does something deep inside you tell you that
it is not all? That there is something else that was always there in you, just
long forgotten, buried under the accumulated material of life? That maybe
this is not just an idea, maybe it's reality? Does it feel real?
If your passing interest in "Foothills
of Understanding" has aroused some mild curiosity in you, but you do not
want to experience anything uncomfortable in pursuing it, well, you can live
perfectly well without reality, so I thank you for reading this far and suggest
you leave now.
Do you want to know "the answer"?
Do you just want me to get to the point and
tell you what I've learnt, if anything? So perhaps you imagine that learning
why you exist should be easy? But should it be easier than your school exams or
your computer training? From where did you get that idea?
Well, it won't be easy.
Think! The situation you are in now has been
formed over your whole lifetime. You should not expect any quick-fix method for
fundamentally changing it.
What I have to say in these pages cannot in
itself be much use to anybody. Could you learn to swim, or to drive a
car, by reading an article or even a book about it? Of course not! You need to
get in the water, or into the driving seat, and learn it in practice, learn
from someone else, learn from your mistakes. And however a book on computers
might claim how easy it is to do whatever you want, what counts is actually
knowing how to do it. And your young relation, still at school, is likely to be
a better means of helping to get your video recorder to do what you want than
the Operator's Instruction Manual!
Why do these things seem so inaccessible?
It is not so obvious to you that it is the
same with the basic questions, like "Why are we here?" "What am
I for?" "Who am I?" Does it not surprise you why
it is not obvious to you how to learn why you were born, whereas
it is obvious to you how to learn to drive a car? Your "education"
has taught you, not directly of course, that such questions are unimportant or
inaccessible. If there are answers to these questions, the solutions seem to be
"hidden", it is apparently "secret knowledge" and suspect,
not acceptable. But it is only secret insofar as everybody around you has been
"educated" to believe such things are unimportant or unnecessary. So
you will never find a course at your local college that can really help you.
What do you actually need?
Groups of a different order do exist today -
real groups. But if you don't have a need to be in one, even if you try, you
won't find one. This is simply because such a group is not able to provide you
with what you want.
My experience of searching that just might help you too:
There
are various ways to start searching. There are various types of conventional
learning that seem to promise something real. Science seems
rational and deals with facts and proving things. Religion seems
to promise salvation by believing in God and living a good life. Education
seems to offer prospects of a happy and successful life. There may appear to be
attractions in fitting in with your environment and helping
people. These are just some of the things that might appear to give your
existence on this planet a new purpose.
All I
aim to be is a stepping stone to someone, as that would help me as well as you.
At least I have, willy-nilly, some life experience. Maybe you can learn it
faster than I did, and move on. Chances are that you don't need what I have to
offer.
Science, Religion, Education, Planet, Purpose
Each
of these pages relates to one facet of my own experience of searching, from my
early hopes to finding some elements of understanding gained with help from
working with other people. This somehow includes what went before, but shown up
in a different light that is really common sense.
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As text like this can be "heavy
going", I have now added "bullet points" throughout to enable
a quick overview of the content. As to whether you will lose anything
important by reading only these bullet points - Well! That's your problem! There have been other minor modifications
along the way, and there is an update for PLANET. |
· Bullet points added |
|
It became necessary to delete my former
contact address in May 2004, and only now has it become opportune to
re-launch with a new contact address, for the benefit of anyone who has tried
to contact me in the meantime and for new contacts. I see no reason to change the content. It
is not my intention to attract the casual web-surfer, and if it attracts only
a small number of responses, that is perhaps how it should be in the world in
which we find ourselves - or rather, my particular reflection of it. There is however something additional for me to write: |
Falling asleep and re-awakening |
The wonderful thing is to discover that I am.
Why do I wish to tell you this? Because it
simply expresses the real progress inside an atom of humanity, a fellow human
being. It is a step forward that opens oneself to new hopes and new
possibilities, which for many of us is the essence of life.
It is the freedom of not trying to be someone else. After more than half a lifetime of searching, intellectualizing, trying everything and usually not liking what I see, this is a wonderful discovery. It is an inner freedom, a sense of being. It is also a relief, I feel safe, and encompasses all that has gone before. Whilst this shows the partial blindness in those strivings, those particular strivings were apparently, however convoluted and complicated, necessary for me. It is safe because it is a new beginning.
The Gurdjieff Work has played a vital part in
my life.
"Friendly Advice" at the very
beginning of "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" concludes with
Only then will you be able to count upon forming your own impartial judgment, proper to yourself alone, on my writings. And only then can my hope be actualized that according to your understanding you will obtain the specific benefit for yourself which I anticipate, and which I wish for you with all my being.
· Falling asleep and re-awakening
In growing up from child to adolescent to the
age of maturity the innocence of life is gradually lost. It is replaced by
forgetting oneself and allowing oneself to be dragged into an illusory world,
by becoming identified with all kinds of things inside and outside, and
learning to fear them and to react as best one can. In these difficult
conditions the essential life of people gets drowned and carried away in the
frenetic human activity that seems to be leading towards a society akin to the
life of ants or bees - an organized social structure that is natural but acts
on a level that is less than human.
Dissatisfaction in early life led eventually to my discovery of the Gurdjieff Work and active participation in it. This showed me that my unease had not been groundless. Here we found something essentially real, based on the aim of Mr. Gurdjieff for the harmonious development of man, a real teaching that had been passed through to our teacher together with our group. Such help is essential. It is they who help one to make the necessary efforts, whereas otherwise one remains in sleep.
In 1996, Pope John Paul II wrote:
It is our duty then to live in history,
side by side with our peers, sharing their worries and hopes, because the
Christian is and must be fully a man of his time. He cannot escape into another
dimension, ignoring the tragedies of his era, closing his eyes and heart to the
anguish that pervades life. On the contrary, it is he who, although not
"of" the world, is immersed "in" the world every day,
though what one may come to find the
appropriate action, I think, will not necessarily be what is generally viewed
as according to the Christian religion.
Mme Jeanne de Salzmann, chief pupil of Mr.
Gurdjieff, wrote an article "First Initiation":
You have no measure with which to measure
yourselves..... You lie to yourself, every moment, all day, all your life......
You must stop inwardly and observe..... When you have seen your two natures,
that day, in yourself, the truth will be born.
Now there is a certainty that embraces my life. I have a life that is part of organic life on earth, my body, its every heartbeat, every breath, every movement, sensation, thought, feeling.
· The Law
of 3, The Holy Trinity
From this place of inner freedom life is a
dynamic process that does not stop, it goes on all the time. My own first
expression of it was something like - "Creator, creation, and the means
whereby the one expresses itself through the other". A human being can be,
and should be, a conscious participant in this process, and from this place I
see the possibility of a new beginning in my own being.
On the first page of "Beelzebub's
Tales", Mr. Gurdjieff pronounces the invocation, "In the name of
the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen." and continues:
Having begun thus, I can now be quite at
ease and should even, according to contemporary notions of "religious morality",
be completely assured that from now on everything in this new venture of mine
will proceed, as is said, "like a pianola."
Later he writes
... began to be aware of these three holy
forces, which they named ....
Holy
Affirming,
Holy Denying,
Holy Reconciling,
transubstantiate in me
for my being.
It is a new beginning starting from nothing, continuing to work with the exercises given in the group. Having now some insight into who I am and why we are here, it is necessary to start to learn how to "put fuel in the tank" and to act effectively on my own initiative. It starts from knowing what to do and one's own inability to do it. In practice there may be moments of revelation, but lasting and effective change allowing something to crystallize requires patient attention and does not come overnight. Understanding requires being as well as knowledge, doing and not just thinking about it, and comes from a different place inside.
