Throughout my life, I have always found myself looking for magic, looking for the mysterious. I sometimes feel enveloped in love – yet with a taste of loneliness. When I bother to look, there are similar dichotomies and paradoxes that are threaded through my life experience, like clear water poured into a jar of rocks. This sense disturbs the surface colors of my being with deeper, silent ribbons of something that feels like sadness, but also like wonder. I don’t know why.
Past, present, future seem to make no difference on this earthy plane, yet there is presence beyond the mundane, and when I can be aware of it, I am occupied and filled with a vibration of the life within and surrounding me. I have experienced it. I cannot seem to make anything like this happen, but sometimes I can invite it and it comes.
Many questions arise: Is it possible to have a wish without striving, and openness without expectation? I try. It’s the closest I come to a direction towards more understanding of my situation. How can I wish something without working towards it actively in the ordinary sense? How can I be open to something new without looking for a result? It’s puzzles like these that have fueled some discoveries for me.
There’s something out of the ordinary cracking the façade of this existence: a penetrating light that reveals a truth of scale. In my life, I have been an occasional witness to this experience. My nothingness is extinguished in that light --dissolved, relieved, and at peace. And there’s nothing to do but be when I am suddenly aware of being a part of something so vast. I speculate: there must be a small part of me that is of that light for me to be able to even intuit its being there. There is no answer to my question why. It just is. I have the dimmest inkling about a mystery I can only sense when I remember to look.
Is it possible to have a wish without striving, and openness without expectation? How can I wish something without working towards it actively in the ordinary sense? How can I be open to something new without looking for a result?
How can the materials I can access on this ordinary, mundane level benefit the next. Perhaps integration with a higher energy? Is there something I can do to approach and more fully know that mystery? What on this plane causes ripples in the next? Is it thought, action, feeling, creation? Here, I’m not just thinking of something outside of myself, but also my inner world, so much bigger than I often realize. Is it bringing my attention to any of these?
In a single moment of true happiness, satisfaction, and joy, I see that it’s worth trying and worth repeating the effort of attention. Moment by moment, something grows, something changes, and yet I have not done this. I have not made those changes or growth happen. It is not my achievement; it is an emerging path that somehow I can now see more clearly -- clearly enough perhaps to see the next step on life’s road.
In a single moment of true happiness, satisfaction, and joy, I see that it’s worth trying and worth repeating the effort of attention.
I have several vivid childhood memories, but one in particular stands out as my first conscious questioning about my life. I was maybe seven years old and staying the night at my grandparents’ house. I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t go back to sleep. It was as if something was calling me. I got out of bed and walked down the hallway to the stairs. They were dark, hardwood, and carpeted in a short pile wool runner with a woven pattern of large pink and red roses. The runner was held in place by brass rods fixed at the inner joint of each stair tread.
I descended the stairs midway down. Five more steps and I would be at the landing, but standing there, I could see my entire figure reflected dimly in the mirror attached to the landing wall angled upwards. My grandmother had the mirror installed so that when she dressed up, she could see all 4’10” of herself from head to toe. There were no lights on in the house, but there was a low glow from the streetlight, entering through the small half-circle window of the front door and also through the crack in the drapes, lined with white sheers on the front picture window.
That light bounced off the mirror over the mantlepiece at the fireplace and shed a dim glow everywhere. To my right was a half-wall, and I could look over and see the mantlepiece and all the cut crystal vases and bowls sparkling in the low light. Atop the half-wall was a black wrought iron lady figurine in the style of the 1920s. She was in a floor length gown, twirling, looking up with one arm uplifted as if she were dancing. In that hand was a large, open, many-petaled rose and in the center of the rose, a small pointed light bulb. The light was usually lit in the evenings for ambiance. I could feel the stubbly wool carpet under my toes as I stood there. I felt all of myself. Barefoot, I was a little chilly in my nightgown, and a bit thirsty.
I felt myself infused with the vibrations holding all this aliveness together.
Standing there, I remembered my father saying how important being present was. To really be there. At that age, I tried hard to “do” that, as if I were holding my breath as long as I could. In my young mind, I struggled to know what he meant. I thought maybe if I could do it, I would understand more, and it would change my life. I felt a sense of myself alone and listened to the silence which was not silent.
I heard a car drive by in the night and knew it was a stranger going somewhere he knew, and I did not. I did imagine that it was a man in a long dark coat with a fedora hat. I kept waiting for some kind of magic to happen. Maybe I was expecting God or an angel to appear or speak to me. I stood there for fifteen minutes; it seemed forever. Finally, when my legs got tired and ‘nothing special’ happened, I went back to bed. But I thought to myself, “I know I will never forget these moments for my whole life. When I am old, I will still remember this.” But something special did happen. This was my first feeling of being in the sense of aliveness as part of universal awareness.
The joy of sharing these discoveries together and developing a silent learning and understanding between us is all a part of the growth of being.
I felt myself infused with the vibrations holding all this aliveness together – I was the dark night outside, the sound in the silence, the dim light and shadows in the living room, the man in the fedora who was perhaps going home to his kitchen table, covered in red oilcloth with some cocoa waiting for him, and I was me too – all at once, all connected.
The Gurdjieff Work and the guidance it has provided is of value to me because the teaching is for reopening those doors through which these very magical connections can take place and inform my growth as a human being. I am able to learn gradually what it means to live within those connections, not just thinking about or believing they are there. It is a very personal search for connection and meaning because it is mine, yet it has also helped me to expand my view of my responsibility towards myself and, concurrently, to others as an inseparable obligation should I choose to commit myself. It is always a choice.
We are one.
There is a richness to my life as a result of these revelations, yet paradoxically it has no semblance of feeling burdensome. The palpable energy of working together as a group has only enhanced my sense of direction, meaning, and my ability to be present more often to a life of which I am a small part. The joy of sharing these discoveries together and developing a silent learning and understanding between us is all a part of the growth of being.
I offer a short poem I wrote after meditation at a Gurdjieff retreat:
Lights dimmed golden;
Muslin screens
Honey satin polished wood
Tapestry room without walls
I do not end, I blend
Trees weave their wind
Silence is sound
Stillness moves
We are one.