Saturday, August 21, 2021
4:45 a.m. The body as shock-absorber – as reconciler, I suppose – of all the tensions arising from various strands living together. Slide-switches set for maximum receptivity, clarity, focus. You’re on.
Perhaps the place to begin is to remember our statement that the goal is not “perfect health” as you often think, but “perfect adjustment.” This is one example of that.
This hinges on the fact that you are more complicated than at first may appear. “You” are:
- Multiple strands coexisting as a new unit. Each strand originated (in 3D terms) in different places and times. They have wildly different values, goals, beliefs. They may hate one another, or be the closest of friends, and anything in between.
- A would-be unit functioning in what appears to be an external, unconnected environment, “the world” and “the times.”
- A localized consciousness that retains its connection to the source and is in varying degrees conscious of that connection.
That’s enough to be going along with. A thorough examination of these three aspects of physical existence would give you all you need to know about the world and your place in it – which, though you may or may not realize it, includes what is often called “the next world.” So keep in mind that although we appear to be concentrating upon “the body,” it is no more limited to specifics than is our examination of spirit or soul. The existence of words notwithstanding, it’s all one thing, as we keep saying. Body, spirit, soul, time, space, consciousness – to deal with life in words, we must proceed sequentially, analytically, examining pieces one by one. But reality, always try to remember, is not divided.
Let us look at the three conditions of your 3D existence in greater detail. (Bear in mind, though, that even detailed explanation can be no more than sparks, no matter how great the effort expended.)
Multiple strands coexisting
Those of you who grew up in large families will have an easier time envisioning the ramifications than only children, or orphans, or those with only one or even two brothers or children. Or, any who have had intense prolonged experiences of enforced association – soldiers, perhaps, or those in jobs or in some situation involving involuntary interrelationship, even apartment-house living, say, or perhaps years in a residential school – all those experiences may have given you analogous experiences, illustrative pictures.
The point is this. To greater or lesser extent, any prolonged association involves tensions as well as cooperation. The very coexistence may serve to increase your energy level, so to speak. It won’t always be pleasant; how could it be? But although you cannot choose your enforced companions, you can determine your own attitude toward them.
Perhaps you can see the difficulties here, as in any self-help advice on how to improve your life, etc. Which you? Who is there to make decisions such as “What should my attitude be toward these others?”
Gurdjieff laid heavy stress on the fact that we think of ourselves as “I” but in fact a succession of speakers take the chair, each assuming it is “I” and each, for the moment it is in the chair, thinking it is always in the chair.
Every hint we have ever given you, every spark we have tried to strike, is aimed at waking you up so that the same speaker is in the chair. All else is spinning your wheels.
“No work can be done in sleep.”
Precisely.
The 3D environment
From the fingers of the hand writing this, to the eye of the person reading it, you depend upon your bodies to interface with the world. At least, that is hw you usually think of it. But is that hand, that eye, not part of “the world”? You may think to distinguish your body from the rest of the “external” world, but we hope we have already led you to realize that in fact matter is matter. (The fact that matter is not what it appears to be is true, but not relevant here.) Whatever matter is, your body is part of it. You may think of yourself as spirit using a body – “the ghost in the machine” – but still, the body is “of the earth, earthly” – yet is not any the less “you” as well. By inference, you and “the world” cannot be neatly divided into two things. And it is your control of the body that allows you to experience the rest of the shared subjectivity as you do.
That “shared subjectivity” includes space and time; try not to forget that. Because they are conditions rather than “physical objects,” they may seem to you to be somehow different from consideration of “the world,” but how could there be a 3D world without them? They are not separate from the world but an intrinsic part of it.
By inference, your existence in 3D must involve close association with time and space. It isn’t as simple a connection as would seem by the fact that you cannot physically move from the living-present moment.
That moment is a connection!
Ye, a transitory connection between your consciousness and other parts of time-space. That is what the art of astrology attempts to map or rather to hint at. Each moment is distinct, with its own special properties. How can that be, if you live (as you do, in fact) in one unchanging living-present moment? The answer – or the hint toward the answer – is that the present moment is always your connection, and at the same time each moment opens connections to other moments: In effect, each moment is both eternal and unchanging, and transitory and connective. And you, in your 3D body, are riding the combination.
A localized consciousness
Here is the source of what Thoreau called “a divine discontent.” You aren’t fully at home in “the world.” Regardless your theories of what it is, or what you are, you have an uneasy relationship to it, that expresses in different ways for different people.
If you accept the world as externally there, meaning what it appears to mean, you may be tempted to take advantage of it, or to master it, or to reform it. Each of these impulses is the same thing, thought of differently.
If you see the world as mind-stuff but still alien to what and who you are, you may be tempted by fantasies of power (for whatever ends, altruistic or demonic or anything in between), and this is still the same thing in another guise.
Only if you see it as terrain upon which you are to play or work or suffer or enjoy and/or whatever (yourself being a visitor, so to speak), may you come to realize that this is not your home (though it is), and that you are not what you seem to be (though in another sense, you are indeed.)
That is, the more you identify with the body and its world, the harder you may find it to remember that “you” – the basis of you, the essential you – are something far more (and perhaps in a sense also far less) than a mere 3D being. It is an uncomfortable realization. People fight it. but when they let it in, things change.
We are well past our hour, but although it seemed to proceed steadily, we didn’t get too much.
We did better than you think. Next time, more on your life as localized consciousness.
All right. Our thanks for this, as usual. A title for today’s?
Call it, perhaps, “Three conditions of 3D existence.”
Three complications, maybe?
That would work too. Your choice.
Okay.