Suffering is an inevitable part of being human. Gurdjieff called our Earth a pain factory, and said that while much suffering was unavoidable, there was also a great deal that was unnecessary and caused by our own defective psychology.
We are all born into families where parents suffer from negative emotions. We were not designed to be unhappy, but due to a flaw in Creation - described slightly differently by the Bible and by the Work, but essentially leading to the same situation - we have all imbibed negative emotions with our mothers' milk.
Our parents were negative because their parents were negative, and so on, back to the earliest human beings on Earth.
Why? Because we have disobeyed God, says the Bible, and inherited the fallen nature of Adam and Eve. The Work says we have all suffered from the consequences of "Kundabuffer", a mysterious organ which caused us to see everything the wrong way round.
Whatever the origin, the fact of suffering is undeniable.
There is a story of an old lady who begged the Buddha to relieve her suffering. Her child had died and she could find no relief from her distress. The Buddha told her to enquire at every house in the village until she found a family which had experienced no suffering; then she was to return to him.
The woman obeyed, but of course she found no such family, because every single household experienced sadness, sickness, poverty or another source of suffering; sometimes all three.
But her search taught her to live with her suffering, because she now realized it was part of the human condition.
We have been raised, most of us, by sleeping people. We are fortunate indeed if our parents were Good Householders. Today, the zeitgeist leaves most people in limbo; their religious faith is being rubbished in the media and in society at large; we are surrounded by a sea of technology, most of which drowns us in trivia; we struggle to make ends meet in a fiercely materialistic and selfish culture; and our world is threatened with catastrophe from climate change, pollution, and wars.
A family headed by Good Householders teaches children to lead their lives without undue fear or anxiety, but with circumspection. Until about sixty years ago, most societies had an accepted religion, and whatever abuses may have been committed in its name, the overall effect was good. People knew there were natural laws and written commandments about our behaviour, and their consciences were less buried, less confused than is becoming the case for many today.
Most people believed in God. This belief helped them cope with the daily sufferings and stresses life placed upon them, and consequently they were able to teach their children to bear such suffering with equanimity, yielding neither to despair nor to false optimism.
But now, with Christianity and Judaism being persecuted in many areas of the world, and with the whole idea of religion being quietly abandoned in favour of materialism, even the level of Good Householder is now very hard to reach.
And even when parents are Good Householders, they may still be at the mercy of many irrational fears and anxieties, or subject to genetic flaws which create addictions and mental illnesses. The flaw in Creation, "original sin", gives rise to imperfections at every level.
Imagine, then, the state of children raised in families which are not Good Householders. In many segments of society, this is the norm. People have no ideals to pass on to their children, no common behavioural standards which all are expected to observe. Children are at the mercy of their parents' every passing whim, every fit of temper, every manifestation of addiction - alcoholism, codependence, and many, many more.
Or, as Philip Larkin said,
They f*** you up, your Mum and Dad,
They may not mean to, but they do;
They give you every fault they had,
Then add some new ones, just for you.
Indeed. And so many now reach adulthood in a state of emotional chaos, having been given a neglectful, muddled upbringing with no worthwhile goals to aim for except the survival of the fittest.
It is this type of suffering, our neuroses, defence mechanisms, phobias, aversions, addictions and codependence, that Gurdjieff tells us is unnecessary. And thank God that it is.
This is where counselling and therapy can be of enormous help. A wise, insightful, accepting counselor helps clients to understand the internal sources of their suffering, and by seeing them, to be increasingly more free of them.
Counseling is not the Work, of course, as I explained in an earlier post. But it can help people to reach the level of living as Good Householders.
AA and other Twelve-Step programmes are also vital resources for those beset by addictions. They have saved countless lives and helped millions of people to free themselves from addiction and become Good Householders.
The suffering which comes from internal disorder is entirely unnecessary. We can, and must, sacrifice it if we are to make any progress towards living responsibly, let alone to be able to work on ourselves.
If things are not quite as bad as that, if we can manage to see our troublesome negative emotions and identify the I's associated with them, we can begin to make changes. Whether or not we've had counseling, an intuitive Work teacher can help the student see these I's, and offer tasks which can help overcome them. Gradually, the negative emotional I's die away; they still live on, in the basement, but gradually they become less and less influential, like vicious dogs whose barking can still be faintly heard but who can no longer bite us.
The Work tells us that we have a right not to be negative. Not, you note, that we have no right to be negative. We have every right, if we wish, to carry on objecting, complaining, being abused, being self-righteous or angry. The whole gamut of negative emotions is paraded every day on television, in the form of soap operas; clearly, many people still enjoy seeing them and can identify with them.
But we, having begun to work on ourselves, can see how useless such emotions are, how they leak away our precious energy and cause us no end of trouble from their interference in our lives. We don't judge ourselves, nor do we criticize ourselves, for being as we are. We can't help it; we didn't cause it, and we are not to blame for the state we are in when we begin this work.
Once embarked on it, however, we see more and more how such suffering must be given up completely. We can allow negative emotions no voice in our lives. We don't repress them; we simply look, and in the light they gradually start to shrink in power.
When my family and I first came to live in Atlanta, we rented a studio in a rather run-down apartment complex. It all looked all right in the daylight, but in the dark, if you went into the kitchen, there were dozens of cockroaches crawling all over the surfaces. It was a nightmare. One remedy was to switch the light on, and leave it on. They all slunk back to their crevices, and as long as the light was on, they didn't come back.
This is how it is for us in the Work. We try, as far as possible, to live our lives with the lights on. Then those I's which cause us unnecessary suffering will, over time, leave us alone.
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