What is a teaching? -- 2

This summer's series has been transcribed from a talk

given by Roger Lipsey in Cambridge in 2011.

Teachings, as they reach us in the West, take two attitudes toward mainstream culture. One is critical. The other is an invitation to renewal, which must be warm, alive and attractive. Nonetheless, genuine critique is essential and rigorous. Other ways to look at the relation between mainstream culture and teachings is that teachings are a tangent to the circle of mainstream culture, or they are a perpendicular or, if they occur right at the center of the circle of mainstream culture, they are a new axis.

Terra cotta statuette, teacher with a pupil, Greek, late 4th-early 3rd century BCE

There is an example in Thomas Merton’s life. Merton passed through four teachings. The first was the hard school of life whereby, by the age of twenty or so, he was profoundly disillusioned. He knew he couldn’t trust himself: he was a drunkard, a womanizer, a spendthrift. He was everything he hated, and he acknowledged that. The second school was the rigorous traditional monastery he joined. It worked beautifully for him, straightened him out. The third school appeared for him after he became disillusioned with the monastery. He began to discover within the monastery a new axis: the mystical teachings of St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, and others. The fourth school was Zen, offering a further enrichment.

This was a man who molted like a bird. People in teachings do well to molt from time to time. Molting is a very unattractive process. The bird in question looks a bit shabby. From time to time, we do look a bit shabby. But it’s just molt. Have no fear.

Once we grasp that teachings are a critique and an invitation, that they are other than mainstream culture, there is an obvious zone of tension. This will remain interesting to us.

A teaching is rigorous

A teaching is, and must be, rigorous. Gurdjieff offers the example: he was both frightening and infinitely inviting, all at the same time. One had to work it out for oneself whether one would be afraid or invited or both. The teaching itself is quite severe—it is in part a critique. It takes everything that the mainstream asserts and denies or questions it, asks it to be rethought, re-examined. This is classic for an authentic teaching.

A genuine teaching must be an epiphany

It must transform how one sees things, how one experiences oneself. What do I mean by that? Here are some of the core ideas of teaching.

First, they offer general explanations for my particular situation. An example, in Buddhism is the idea of impermanence. If one really takes in that everything is changing, that there is no permanence whatever, that there is nothing but slow or abrupt change, then that can explain and set one’s heart at ease about one’s formerly fruitless effort to completely stabilize one’s life. Accepting the idea of impermanence allows a kind of fluid living and an attention to changing detail that can be perfectly extraordinary. As the realization of impermanence becomes deeper, becomes second nature, it can lead to great cultural creations—to remarkable poetry, remarkable works of art, all based on the perception, deeply accepted, that everything is passing, and so with love, with humor, we can make things that become cultural treasures.

A Poetic Gathering, Matsumura Goshun, 1752-1811, Cleveland Museum of Art

Fundamental to Gurdjieff’s teaching is the idea of mechanicality. From a mainstream perspective, that the human being is a “machine” is unacceptable. What do we mean: machine? Why machine? What an ugly word for a living, breathing being. And, yet, for people who recognize that there’s something about the mind that is terribly driven, and there is something about the feelings that is terribly scattered, untrue, flippant, obsessed, unreliable. And anyone who’s had a serious illness knows that the body is both a miracle and subject to mechanical breakdown. The idea of mechanicality is not inimical to people who have had these perceptions.

What does it allow? Just as the idea of impermanence allows fluid being, a new way of knowing and celebrating life, so the idea of mechanicality, once confirmed and accepted, becomes the springboard for a new attention, an attention that can penetrate, as attention should and must.

Teachings are demanding

If a teaching is not demanding, it is probably not a valid teaching. It's all warmth and hot cocoa. Go somewhere else. There is a lot to think about, a lot to feel one’s way through; there is a whole education in store. Teachings are also physically demanding. The simplest example is a teaching that has a sitting practice, where you are asked to sit still for 40 minutes. Western bodies can find this difficult; they need to be trained to do this. They need practice.

There is a story about Gurdjieff. Some of you know that the Movements are very much a part of the Gurdjieff tradition, that Gurdjieff engages the body through a large repertory of Movements or Sacred Dances. Once in Paris in the post-WWII years, he had conducted a Movements class that included a number of young women, and they were slow to come to his apartment where he expected them. He liked very much to get upset—he had a theatrical side—and he asked with a show of impatience, “Where are they, where are they?” Someone explained that they had been in class, had gotten really sweaty, and had briefly gone to their hotel to shower. His show of displeasure vanished. “Sweat,” he said, as if it were the finest of substances. And it is. A teaching can be measured partly by the production of sweat.

Teachings ask for time

Teachings are not casual. They ask for a certain amount of time, a certain amount of concern, a certain amount of attention, a certain amount of reading. This is the way people should live, but it’s odd in Western culture. The option that Western culture has provided us in the past is an hour in church or temple on Sunday morning, followed by a community gathering where you chat and then go home.

Teachings are not like that. They ask you to show up on Thursday evenings for two hours—for a sitting, your group meeting, or for something that needs to be studied or learned or completed. They ask you to show up for a weekend each month. Teachings are more demanding than the norm, but for those who participate in the Gurdjieff Work, this frequency becomes the norm.

Part 3 will be posted on August 1st.