Last month Frank told of his infatuation
with love and the idea of love. In his inimitable—well, maybe not that
inimitable—personal, poetic, pseudo-philosophic and sometimes illuminating
style he recounted (in a superfluity of words) being cast as Mercutio in Shakespeare’s
great love play, Romeo and Juliet, and how his life parallelled the events
of the play. Even to the playing of Mercutio’s death scene. . .
“This scene was easy for me; I’d been practicing dying on the streets
of Brooklyn for years.”
All of which leads Frank to see the lack of real love in the world. Disillusionment
fires his spiritual quest, a quest that results in finding an “unknown.”
And a way to wake up to love!
As I was saying, the sun rises in the east and so does the new light for each
dark age. This is how it has been in the past: Zoroaster, Buddha, Moses, Jesus,
Muhammad and more recently Rumi and The Bab and Baha’ullah. They all
arose in the East. So there must be a law about this, as there is about everything
else. And this new light that each one brings ignites like a Bic lighter at
the darkest point of the dark age, as if the hand of darkness couldn’t
help itself and has to flick on the light.
A dark age never knows it is dark—understandably, not having light to
make the contrast. A dark age lives in a dark dream that it is an “enlightened”
time. This is what makes its darkness so deep. Look at these times: a canned
and soda pop society proclaiming its “culture” to the world, and
gaining countless adherents. Destruction is called development and noise is
labeled music. Mastering trivia is the height of education. Grand times.
So into our darkness a light has shone—a peculiar, unpredictable light.
Not every sun that also rises sports such dashing moustachios. This one comes
from a corner of the world where a moustache is not the insignia of a villain.
Born within spitting distance of Mt. Ararat, where Noah’s Ark supposedly
ran aground, of an Armenian mother and Greek father, self-taught, self-willed,
unvictimized by higher education, a seeker and a finder, this self-styled
herald of a new world carried with him an old-time smell that blended with
a thoroughly modern mentality.
What makes the advent of George Gurdjieff so appropriate as light-bringer
to these dim, chaotic times is that he doesn’t fit any of the stereotypes.
He is not a cliché of a spiritual figure. He doesn’t wear sandals
or a robe or smile a sanctimonious smile. He’s a man to be reckoned with.
He wears pants, eats with a knife and fork. He listens attentively; he speaks
precisely. He is kind, tender; he shouts and curses. He destroys any dream
that we may be spinning about making him into a guru.
The teaching that Gurdjieff brought and taught is so unlike any other imported
to the West it has been called an “unknown teaching.” Starting with
a shockingly accurate description of man in his usual state, it presents a
precise, specific, practical strategy of human evolution. Its psychology enables
people actually to do something with themselves, to get free of old mindsets
and habit-patterns, as well as to harmonize the mind, the emotions and the
physical body. Through exercises in observation and the development of attention,
a person can transform negative energy, dismantle the false ego, connect to
the real “I” within and to go beyond the small, petty world of me-and-mine
to the larger world of humanity and life on earth, to become a positive force
in the great cosmic process to which we are usually oblivious.
As we and our train of Third, Fourth and Fifth World countries go reeling
into the next millennium, we had better have a more spiritual teaching than
good old gallopping consumption to sustain us and hold us together. And that
teaching had better be free of priests and bible-bangers and dogmatism and
gullible believers. And it had better be something that people can live in
the circumstances of their own lives, every day of the week. And it had better
be true and unadorned. And it had better be a real teaching that people can
work at and not a musty old dream-teaching.
Though this teaching is tailor-made for the world that we’ve made, it
doesn’t go down easily. For those who prefer not to look at the way things
are, it can be highly offensive. Take Gurdjieff’s assessment of the lives
we lead, the springboard for his whole teaching:
“We—meaning you and me, and most specifically you who are reading
these very words—are sleeping, asleep on our feet and dreaming our lives
away. All our thoughts and plans and efforts and reactions come out of this
walking-sleeping dreamy state. The real world is all around us but we are
out of touch with it. Supported by our families and friends, by the society
we live in with all its current ideas and institutions, the sleep enters every
stratum, moving like chloroform, pervading our literature, our media, our
religion, our politics, our arts. The sleep is hypnotic and all-pervading.
The sleep is so deep we imagine that we are awake and that we are acting as
conscious beings, oblivious of the blatant fact that all we think, do and
say arises from our personal, subjective fantasy world. We live in sleep and
we die in sleep.”
Hardly a message to gain thousands of blissed-out-sappy-happy disciples. Or
to get the messenger recognition in the Encyclopedia Brittanica: it has taken
the E B three-quarters of a century to begrudgingly squeeze in two small paragraphs
on Gurdjieff.
Undaunted by the lack of popular acclaim, Gurdjieff goes on delineating the
place of self-deception and imagination in our state of waking-walking-sleep.
In this sleep we are able to deceive ourselves about ourselves continually,
weaving dream pictures and dream stories around our exaggerated self-importance,
growing troubled and offended and distressed only when life and others defy
the fantasy. Our imagination, which could in a true waking state be used to
create, is devoted to puffing ourselves up. We imagine and we believe the
spinnings of our imagination: unconscious, we imagine that we are conscious;
subjective and touchy, we imagine that we are objective; ignorant, we imagine
that we know; unable to fix our own life, we correct everyone else’s;
a whole, contradictory and unruly crowd, we imagine that we are one single,
integrated person (explaining away the many opposing people within us as the
many sides of “my rich and varied character”). What’s more,
driven by passing desires and moods, we believe ourselves to be possessors
of will, and of “will-power,” as well as of freedom of choice. And
to top it off, possessing neither stability nor substance, we imagine and
believe that we are immortal. A delightful dream picture that so satisfies
us that we never make any actual effort to earn these capacities.
Enough, you say. Why dwell on all this business about sleep anyway? Even if
it is true? If it’s true we’re going to forget it anyway and go
on dreaming, so what’s the point? And what the hell does all this have
to do with love?
Well, one reason I bring it up, in such a sweet pudding of an article on love,
is because it sheds light on the collegiate quandary I mentioned earlier.
(You remember: Why is there so little love around when we sing about it and
wish for it so much?) If people are not really awake and are merely sleepwalking
and acting and talking from their dreams, how can they be expected to love?
If each is sleeping and dreaming their own dream, how can they see one another
and listen to one another? Doesn’t all the hurt and harm and killing
we do come because we’re not in touch with the real world?
If we could awaken from this sleep that Gurdjieff’s teaching talks of,
we could begin on the path of love. We could learn how to love and we could
develop the ability to love.
There are those who will scoff at the idea that Gurdjieff’s teaching
is a path to love. Imprisoned in intellectualism, one can hardly do otherwise.
This approach drags in superiority and contempt for others. So these scoffers
point to the published material on the Teaching to show how infrequently the
word love is used. And they’re right. You’ll find plenty on attention
and watchfulness, but little on love. Yet if one looks deeper, one sees the
wisdom of avoiding hollow and worn-out words in approaching the real thing.
“Love” is so downplayed in the Teaching that some conclude that
it is a loveless system. The classic encounter between Waite and Ouspensky
illustrates this misapprehension.
Years ago in merry old England when Gurdjieff teacher Peter Ouspensky was
drawing hundreds of notable seekers to his lecture hall, he once drew Arthur
Edward Waite. Waite was a renowned occultist who had popularized the tarot.
Having come to check out this Ouspensky and this new teaching, he listened
for a while, listening as most of us do, for the words that fit into our scheme.
When he could listen no longer (to this talk of sleep and of the necessity
to awaken) Waite stood up and declared:
“Then, there’s no place for love in your system, Mr. Ouspensky.”
And he promptly walked out.
Any teaching—just like a bowling ball—can be given a spin. It all
depends on emphasis. Though Gurdjieff’s teaching has been presented in
a chilly fashion, it can be presented far more warmly. And truthfully. His
Teaching can provide us with a practical way to love and magnify that love
through a hungering universe.
To taste the true flavor of this Teaching all we need do is look at the man
himself. No one who got near Gurdjieff ever characterized him as “cold.”
Searching for 20 years through dangerous corners of the world, synthesizing
the results, setting up schools from Moscow to Paris, spreading his message
despite revolution, bullet wounds, lack of funds, difficult students, a hostile
press, Nazi occupation, car crashes and bodily deterioration, he was a man
with hot coals in his pockets! And while it is true that he didn’t wear
his heart on his sleeve, it was in the right place. And should you hear the
recorded voice of Mr. Gurdjieff you’ll be surprised at the warmth, the
love that comes across.
Then there is this much-neglected exhortation of his: Make Love Your Aim,
and Then Look for Direction. In that simple sentence we have the key to understanding
the purpose of that magnificent edifice that he called “The System.”
When we make love our aim, we no longer seek mere definitions, we are no longer
satisfied with the show and surface of love. We recognize the obstacles in
us and work at developing the ability to love. And, most importantly, since
a person, absent, dozing in the land of oblivion can love only in his dreams,
we strive to wake up.
Listen to the best-selling poet in America, Jelalludin Rumi, from 12th Century
Persia, dinning our ears with the urgency to awaken:
He has the work who has become desirous of good
and that work’s sake is not identified with
any other work. The rest are like children playing
these few days till the departure at nightfall.
When any drowsy one awakes and springs up, him
the nurse Imagination beguiles, saying,
‘Go to sleep my darling, for I will not
let anyone disturb thy slumber.’
But you (if you are wise) will tear up your
slumber by the roots like the thirsty man who heard
the sound of running water.”
NEXT MONTH:
TAKING AIM: The Three Pillars of Love