Into the Paradox of Responsibility

One of the most vexing paradoxes we face in this life lies in trying to understand the scope of our responsibility. We look out into the world, see a tragic mess, and feel called to act, but never are we free from the spectre of that timeless teaching: One must first put one's own house in order before trying to order the world. This sentiment, already alive in the time of Confucius some 2,500 years ago, seems to have been echoed by every great teacher since. If individuals remain without self-knowledge and inner harmony, we’ve been told, then we will be helpless but to reproduce the ills that fill the world with sorrow.

Piet Mondrian, Apple Tree In Bloom, 1912, Kunstmuseum Den Haag

“But the sages of the past lived in different times!” we say. “Surely, we don’t have the luxury of perfecting ourselves in a monastery while mankind speeds toward calamity!

Sometimes I can hear Mr. Gurdjieff’s voice: You believe everything is different now, I think he would say. But nothing is different. In fact, his contribution to this great paradox was to deepen it. Whereas teachers of the past tended to suggest that conditions could improve if we human beings would only use our agency in a more sober and humane way, Gurdjieff strips back the assumption that most of us even possess agency, or can do anything at all. 

It is true that such stark pronouncements can make the Gurdjieff teaching seem like a steep and massive rock face – daunting, pessimistic, and cold. But if one can stay in front of it for just a moment longer, inevitably there appears a ray of light, of hope, shining from just behind the mountain’s edge. With great effort, human beings can awaken. Conditions on earth could be different, if only we would do our part.

... human beings can awaken. Conditions on earth could be different, if only we would do our part.

In this perennial problem which haunts both philosophy and everyday life, Gurdjieff is actually a source of hope, for here, finally, we have a starting point that feels honest. We know we must start at the beginning. The paradox, then, is not only deepened, but imbued with a new sense of possibility. 

But immediately we pull away. Awakening is not for us, we say. It’s embarrassing to even think about. Me!? I can’t even survive rush-hour without my inner world turning into something like a Hieronymus Bosch painting. 

It might be precisely here that the Work begins. The embarrassment may be a clue. After all, Gurdjieff did not ask us to begin with heroic visions of personal transformation and of changing the world. He asks us to begin with something far more ordinary and far more difficult: the effort to see reality as it is. Before we can act responsibly in the world, he taught, we must first come into contact with the world.

Perhaps what is being asked of us, then, is not that we disengage from the events of life in the material plane, but that we discover a new valuation of life in the eternal now—a truer balance between inner effort and outer involvement, where the two can reciprocally grow. 

Perhaps what is being asked of us, then, is not that we disengage from the events of life in the material plane, but that we discover a new valuation of life in the eternal now

Again, we pull away. Not “the present moment” again! Is any phrase so painfully trite as this? And it is true. For most of us, “the present moment” has been both diluted by its ubiquity in everyday talk and drained of vitality after years of habitual efforts to “be here now” and to “remember myself.”

We are again in front of an impasse: I don’t know how to live responsibly, and I’m not willing to give anything up to find it. So perhaps we need a new way in. And while it is often our teachers that show the way, I’ve found that sometimes the teacher is life. 

The Gaddi Torso, 2nd c BCE Greece, Uffizi Museum, Florence.

Not long ago, life brought me to my knees. An inner voice I had been suppressing—the one who said, You know what you need to do—rose up and would not recede. This time there was no negotiating. So I removed my earbuds, went to a quiet place in my home, and sat in silence. Looking out into the grey evening sky, I waited. And after a time, I felt ready to begin. I started speaking aloud. And after every question, every petition, every expression of doubt and weakness, there came a response. It was as if the answers were already inside, but could not be revealed until earnestly sought.

 I was told to give up my fiendish attachment to earthly results. I was told to relinquish my desires and expectations. I was told that the future is not up to me, and that I might never get any of the things I say I want. I was told that I already have everything I need, and I was given a mantra to this effect. In short, I was told to surrender and to embrace nothing less than an entirely new mode of life – a mode where one sees what is needed in the moment, and then does his best to respond. So I tried … 

To be here and now must not be a familiar idea; it must be new – a merging with reality. A gentle but serious inner gesture – a whole-bodied process – of dissolving into being. This, I feel, is the beginning of my responsibility.

Following this encounter, there was a profound shift in my life. Doors opened and good things flowed toward me like almost never before. But just as quickly, I learned that the honeymoon is brief indeed. If the effort is not constantly renewed, old habits resume, the doors start creaking shut, and the suffocating greed of desire begins to creep back in. 

So these messages I received were almost like an arrow, an indication, helping me to find the scope of my responsibility, the zone of my work. It is … “here.” And “now.” But truly. I see that I have to find the reality of these words free of all that has accumulated around them. To be here and now must not be a familiar idea; it must be new – a merging with reality. A gentle but serious inner gesture – a whole-bodied process – of dissolving into being. This, I feel, is the beginning of my responsibility.