Questioning

The Hard Light of Day

Many years ago I spent 9 months at a Gurdjieff school. One of my closest comrades there was Rod Moss. Afterwards we travelled together through Europe, Turkey, & Iran and I later stayed with him for several weeks in Melbourne where he lived at the time. Later he moved to Alice Springs. Here is a record of some of the work he has done in the intervening years. For more images click here.

Gurdjieff's Reciprocal Maintenance (part one)

 
 At the news about the Gulf oil spill, my daughter, who lived in New Orleans for six years (including Katrina), cried out, “What is wrong with us!?”

Wouldn’t most people just say it’s a tragically unfortunate accident, or blame BP or the government, someone? Are there some, the truly callous, who consider fouling our own nest and killing untold plants and animals just the cost of doing business? I don't know.

A real question. “What is wrong with us!?” Not them, us.

Gurdjieff asserts that we, as a species, are lop-sided in our development. It's easy to see that our technological expertise, our rationality, far, far outstrips our understanding, our emotional development, our being.

But is there more to this? Is something wrong with us?

I find it surprising that I give more and more credence to historical-spiritual points of view that say that long ago something happened to the human race, something that led to our current state of affairs.

I never understood the doctrine of original sin. How could that make any sense? It still seems a little crazy to me. But could it come from an intuition that has some basis in fact?

As I wrote in a another post Gurdjieff gives a different perspective in his great mythology All & Everything. He says that for certain reasons early in our history the Higher Powers implanted a something in Mankind to make us see reality upside down… later, the something was removed, but its effect still continues in us.

How is one to take this? Crazy talk? Purely symbolic? How could one possibly verify?

But isn't it a fact that something is wrong with us?

There are many trains of thought that could leave from this station. The one I want to follow is this: One of the main problems of humanity is that we don’t know our place in the world.

We don’t know why we exist. We don’t understand our role. We don’t have a clue about our place in the reciprocal maintenance of all and everything.

(to be continued)

Gurdjieff & Uncertainty

What is certainty? A fixed notion? Does being uncertain equal being in question? 

The lastest issue, #51, of The Gurdjieff Journal is now out. The cover essay, Certainty in a Time of Uncertainty delves deeply into these questions.

How to learn to be able to stand “on the cliff edge of the certainty of uncertainty?” 

Also a great piece addressing certainty/uncertainty by James Opie in the Spring 2010 issue of Parabola entitled “Does Something Within Us Know More Than We Do?” The article references Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer.”