We are creatures of community—we live and interact with others countless times each day. If we are able to look more closely, we would see that these interactions are rife with petty reactions, affinities and disaffections, and conflicts real and imagined. The mind is awhirl with assessments and judgements about myself and those with whom I intersect. The emotions are abuzz within a narrow range of self-congratulation and validation or, just as undermining, self-denigration and self-judgement.
In the Gurdjieff Work, the Sturm and Drang of our inner life is called internal considering — a
persistent, reflexive response to the world outside of me and also to the psychic world within me that has, as its source, self-love. Vanity, pride, the need for recognition, acknowledgement, validation, the urge to be right, to know--these can be traced to a self-love that is so deeply rooted it remains invisible to my awareness. But it is the lens through which virtually all impressions of the world are filtered and by which my responses are calibrated, all without my being aware.
The circuit of self-congratulation and condemnation is hand in glove with my assessment and judgement of others. Internal considering conditions how I see others while preventing me from seeing myself. An automatic mechanism always in play, it guides and colors my view of the world around me and objectifies those whom I purport to love. As the leading edge of self-love, this internal considering clouds the waters of relationship and can easily poison it, creating discord where this is none or imagining harmony where none exists. It is the way in which my view of the world is distorted to where I cannot see clearly what is needed for myself or for the other.
The Gurdjieff teaching speaks of another kind of considering: external considering, an intentional way of seeing the other, of putting myself in the other’s position and trying to see the world from his or her point of view. It means working in the moment to put my automatic responses aside and to look at the other’s situation with the wish for clarity and insight. By making this effort, the automatic agent of self-love is put on pause. If I truly wish to see the other, to help him, to empathize with his condition, to understand his world view, my world view must shift and move away from my egocentrism.
The Gurdjieff teaching speaks of another kind of considering: external considering, an intentional way of seeing the other, of putting myself in the other’s position and trying to see the world from his or her point of view.
Martin Buber wrote the treatise entitled “I and Thou” in which he posits that human life finds its meaningfulness in relationships. In his view, the potential for human relationships is defined by two dialectics: I-It or I-Thou. In the first instance, he speaks of a relationship to the world of object, of experience and sensation (phenomena), the I-It; in the second, a living relationship sustained in the spirit marked by “the melting of the between” (noumena), the I-Thou. In Buber’s view, all our relationships bring us ultimately into relationship with God, the Eternal Thou.
For Buber, the I-Thou relationship is marked by mutuality where we relate to others as authentic beings without judgement. There is a directness where we are present and accessible to each other—a relating to one another that is unimpeded by inner considerng and judgement. It is a relating that has an ineffable quality, something that cannot be articulated.
External considering is a change in the polarity of energy between myself and the other, from a negative, in-flowing energy to a positive, out-flowing, regenerative energy, an exchange that augments and opens to different influences. The energies become less dense. The “between” begins to melt away.
A marvelous surprise is how freeing this effort is … not to be hobbled, even if for a few moments, by self-love, by self-mage, and to truly wish to inhabit an atmosphere created by two, not the one, not just myself. There is a richness and a possibility that evades the normal, self-proscribed world of ego. In making even small efforts, the return is a hundredfold. The awareness of shared energies—I to the other, and the other to me—is not something one can replicate on one’s own. It requires two, and it is a precious thing.
In a talk in London, Krishnamurti said, “Our relationship with each other is based on our own image of the other and so on. So as long as there is an image-maker, that image-maker prevents actual relationship with each other.” First, the question is how to see the image-maker, and then to begin to disarm the image-maker, an action that takes place through the dynamic of intentionally relating.
Relationship with others is an arena rife with automatic reactions and patterns, all developed over years of inner habit. People are asleep. I am asleep. And in this collective sleep, I do foolish and thoughtless things all the time. I am unhelpful and selfish. I ignore the needs of the other. I fail to see what is needed to help, to support. Countless times each day, I miss opportunities to be more open and more responsive. And in my interactions with others, my mechanicality, clearly on view for them to see, is opaque to me. I am busy putting myself in a good light and trying to prevent others from seeing my weaknesses and negative characteristics.
Gurdjieff offered up another tool, a way to work with others, that can expose my most deeply held attitudes: it is an intentional practice that he called “bearing the unpleasant manifestations of others.” It is a revolutionary idea: it asks that as I interact with someone, particularly someone I do not like, I work inwardly to accept his or her manifestations without requiring any change, to see how I might free myself from the habitual negativity that arises in response to him or her.
Gurdjieff offered up another tool, a way to work with others, that can expose my most deeply held attitudes: it is an intentional practice that he called “bearing the unpleasant manifestations of others.
In trying to bear the unpleasant manifestations of others, a truism emerges despite my wanting desperately not to have this be so: I see that the unpleasantness of the other is my unpleasantness, that their weakness is my weakness, that their negativity is mine also. This beautiful idea—that the other is my mirror—is not abstract. It is a profound truth. My brother is my teacher. My enemy is my teacher. I need both to help me understand who and what I am.
Gurdjieff wrote, “The highest aim and sense of human life is the striving to attain the welfare of one’s neighbor, and that this is possible exclusively only by the conscious renunciation of one’s own.” Here is the idea of external considering in its highest expression: the understanding that striving for myself—for me, mine—is a one-way, cauterized exercise. Striving for another, for my community, is a path of liberation and service, which is, at its root, the path of love.
Service is a natural outcome of conscious love; love is the agent for service. Here is where love appears in the Gurdjieff Work—a profound truth that invites a lifetime of self-study to plumb its meaning. An active, lived understanding of service and all that this word connotes may be the utmost expression of love. To serve others, to strive for others, implies that to do so I must move beyond the constraints of wishing for and working for myself alone. It is a conscious renunciation of an ego-based self-love and becomes an act of service to something greater than who and what I am, even though I almost always fail to see this fact.
Service is a natural outcome of conscious love; love is the agent for service.
The Gurdjieff way is not the way of self-isolation, monastic regimens, physical deprivation, and of being cut off from others. It is said that this Way, the Fourth Way, demands that I find a way to work in life, meaning that my search for inner synchrony takes place within me as I continue to live my life as mother, teacher, brother, worker, student, partner. The Gurdjieff Work is relational: I to myself, I to another, I to the community of those who share in this search, I to the community of people on this earth, I to the current of the Work. In these relationships, fine energies radiate unseen—but at some level felt—throughout this world, a subtle beckoning to those who have the capacity to hear.
Recently, I was sitting across the table from someone who never fails to elicit a negative reaction from me. My silent, habitual judgement flowed out of me, directed toward this person. In that moment, I saw that my judgment, despite unformed in words, was concrete nonetheless. The radiated force of my reaction had a materiality, and that materiality filled the space in the atmosphere between us. It had its own specific density. I could have reached out and touched it. In that instant I saw that once it had been expressed, even if by thought or reaction, it existed as surely as if I had shouted it out loud. And it was clear that the material of my negativity, once manifested, was irreversible. I could not call it back.
The Gurdjieff Work is relational: I to myself, I to another, I to the community of those who share in this search, I to the community of people on this earth, I to the current of the Work.
This experience brought to mind an idea expressed in a letter by Madame de Salzmann, a student of Mr. Gurdjieff who went on the formalize his teachings following his death. The gist of her statement is this: When thoughts and ideas are expressed in words and those words are spoken, those words land in the hearts of others, and they, in turn, take those words and re-sound them, and the reverberation goes on and on throughout eternity.