The Five Being-Obligolnian Strivings: (4) The Striving, From the Beginning of One's Existence, to Pay as Quickly as Possible for one's Arising and Individuality, in Order Afterward to be Free to LIghten as Much as Possible the Sorrows of Our Common Father

When I first read through "All and Everything", I was, like any beginning Work student, thoroughly baffled! Why on earth did our teacher, Gurdjieff, have to write in such an obscure way? Why didn't he make his precious knowledge more easily available to us?

But then, when I came to the Five Strivings, I thought I'd finally located a part of the book that I could understand.

Of course, I later realized that the teaching had to be presented in this way so that students would spend the maximum amount of energy in struggling to understand them, and that through this process alone could we reach the stage of pondering which brings enlightenment. Reading the book by oneself, then in a Work group, then again on one's own with the knowledge acquired from the group, our teacher, and our own efforts, impresses it upon our unconscious, where our Higher Centres are located.

And the Strivings are not as easy to understand as I first thought.

How on earth could anyone lighten the sufferings of God?

Most Work teachers rightly stress the inner meanings of each Striving. This is the deepest level of understanding, and undoubtedly it's the way that Gurdjieff meant his teachings to be taken. But I think the outer, more obvious, meaning is also important. Our understanding will increase the more we study them, but that doesn't mean that we ignore the external meanings.

So, in the fourth Striving, I initially took the first part of the task to be that of paying for my own existence as a human being living on Planet Earth. And I think that Gurdjieff really did mean that we should take it in this way, as well as on the deeper level.

We know now how very expensive our human existence is, what it takes from the Earth in terms of depleted resources, pollution, disorder and war. Each human being is an enormously expensive entity. If we lived rightly, this would not be the case. But we don't, and Gurdjieff was very prescient in pointing this out.

Bennett and others have expounded on Gurdjieff's ecological understanding, and I won't go into it very much here, except to say that today we know at least some of the damage caused by human carelessness, greed, stupidity and anger. All these negative emotions impel us to act in such a way as to cause the planet itself to deteriorate, and we need to remember that our life here as three-brained beings is an experiment; an experiment which may fail. If we approach, as we seem to be fast doing, the danger of destroying vast parts of the Earth and rendering it uninhabitable, then mankind as a species may become extinct.

My Work teacher emphasized that the Earth, like other planets and stars, was a conscious being, with understanding and power at the level of an archangel. Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis put this teaching into more scientific terms, and today it's been accepted by many scientists who see that the Earth does actually respond to mankind's activities.

So to pay for my own existence here means that I must take care, as has been said, to "live lightly upon the Earth".  More, I must attempt to make some reparation for the damage that my activities have caused; I must promote ecological understanding among others, starting with my own family; and I must attempt to live in such a way that I may become a conscious being worthy of the gift of human life.

 At the very least, human beings should live at the level of Good Householder, and the Earth we live on is part of our "household".

Gurdjieff also emphasized many times how important it is to take care of our parents, how we should love and respect them. In Western society we tend to shunt older people off to institutions rather than caring for them in our own homes, as the extended families of more "primitive" societies do. And sometimes this may be necessary. But while our parents are alive and able to understand, we need to show our gratitude towards them for creating our planetary body, and as they took care of us in our infancy and childhood so we should take care of them in an appropriate way when they are no longer able to look after themselves.

What if our parents were abusive or neglectful? Then we can still be grateful for their gift to us of human existence, and by becoming more conscious ourselves we can put an end to the long chain of suffering which dogs each family where abuse or neglect have occurred. Breaking the chain of abuse may be our reparation, our payment, to them. And we must, however hard it may be, forgive them.

All this, to me, is the meaning of repayment for our "arising".

But the inner meaning of this Striving goes even further.

We must also pay for our "individuality". Surely this means our beginnings of consciousness, our efforts to awaken. As soon as we begin to remember ourselves and to experience at least a taste of real Work, and hence real individuality, we become aware of our huge debt to our teachers.

Beginning with Gurdjieff himself, the Fourth Way in our time has been given to us only at the cost of immense effort and suffering. Our teachers have suffered in order to become conscious, and have struggled to teach us, to pass on their knowledge. We owe them our experiences of individuality, of approaching Real I.

How can we possibly repay them?

Not by money; the Work has never been bought or sold. Students are sometimes asked to contribute to the cost of renting a meeting place or for materials and food on a Work weekend or break. But our teachers have never been paid in this way, nor would a genuine teacher ask for it.

No, the way we repay our teachers is by making efforts. Only our work efforts can effect any sort of payment. By working on ourselves we create the fine substances that have made possible our own evolution and that of other people; our teacher's efforts are repaid by our own.

And here, I think, is the cause of some confusion, because occasionally Gurdjieff would tell a student that he or she alone could repay him for his efforts.

This was, of course, quite true, but it didn't mean that that individual student was to become Gurdjieff's successor, though some misunderstood it in this way.

It means that each Work student, you and I and all the others we know in the Work, need to work on ourselves constantly so that we can repay our teachers for all they have undergone to bring the Work to us.

And eventually, our efforts may become strong enough, intense enough, to lighten the sorrows of God Himself. God is constantly suffering through our inadequacies and failures. Jesus was crucified for our sins, for our lack of understanding, for our failures, in order to teach us the only real way to God. The great saints and mystics, both known and unknown, who comprise Conscious Humanity, suffered to reach understanding and to change their own Being.

This payment is through remorse: the remorse of conscience as we become more and more aware of our Being.

We enter into the suffering of God, and we receive in return unlimited grace, unlimited compassion, which again engenders more remorse as we realize our unworthiness, in an ever-ascending spiral. Through this inner exchange we may experience the energies of God, His unending love and desire for communion with us, His creatures.

Such moments of communion are inexpressibly precious and may be felt as ecstasy. It is suffering, but suffering which is beautiful beyond description. Bernini's marvellous statue of St Teresa of Avila, showing the saint being pierced by an arrow that is wielded by an angel, shows us this experience in immediately understandable form.

This is the teaching of Esoteric Christianity, and the innermost teaching of the Work.

The Fourth Striving expresses this process very succinctly. And it is by living in this way, by suffering voluntarily and performing our Being-Partkdolg Duty, that we can repay God and the universe for our arising and our individuality.

What a tremendous privilege this is.

The Five Being-Obligolnian Strivings: (3) The Conscious Striving to Know Ever More and More About the Laws of World-Creation and World-Maintenance"

With the Third Striving - The Conscious Striving to Know Ever More and More About the Laws of World-Creation and World-Maintenance - we think first of all about the external application, the need to understand and care for the environment.

J.G. Bennett on several occasions drew attention to Gurdjieff's prescience concerning environmental knowledge. Gurdjieff wrote "All and Everything" at a time when few people paid any attention at all to the subject. In the early and middle years of the 20th century it was generally assumed that the environment - nature - was there for mankind to use as desired. Resources were thought to be inexhaustible. Pollution was undiscovered. Capitalism depended on the process of limitless growth in order to prosper; growth, therefore, must be good.

It wasn't until 1962, when Rachel Carson published her seminal work "Silent Spring", that public attention was drawn to the harm we were wreaking on the environment by our careless use of pesticides. Carson postulated a world where, as in the poem, "no birds sing"; hence the "silence" of the book's title. The unrestricted use of chemicals would, she thought, eventually destroy or warp wildlife beyond redemption. We were poisoning the planet we live on.

Such views were seen as almost heretical to begin with, but as scientists turned their attention more and more to the effects of such potent, destructive substances as DDT they saw that we were indeed in danger of killing off both plant and animal life, the very entities on which our own survival depends.

Later, with the pollution studies which followed, the public began to be aware of the need for a more restrained use of chemicals, and in the 1970s the need to care for our environment began to be accepted and promulgated.

With the close of the last century the effects of global warming were also becoming more known, until today, most scientists, along with the general public, have realized that mankind is in a perilous position. If we continue to misuse science and to seek unrestricted economic growth, then we face an uncertain future. We may render our own habitat sterile.

All of this, I believe, can be seen in Gurdjieff's formulation of this Third Striving.

He was so far ahead of his time in his knowledge and his sense of urgency about the situation we face that the full implications of this Striving were not understood until many years after he had written his masterpiece.

Gurdjieff hinted that civilization itself was in danger because of the overuse of chemicals and of electricity.

To begin with, his warning was not understood. Chemicals were surely a blessing - look at the convenience they offered, the shortcuts to achieving just about everything, from cleaning floors to curing illnesses.

And how could electricity possibly pose any threat? It was a huge forward leap; we now had instant light, instant heat, machinery to do just about everything that had previously necessitated huge physical effort or had been impossible, such as the speed of calculation now achievable with artificial intelligence.

Yet it's only recently that we have begun to realize the  full extent of the problems posed by those very machines, including, first and foremost, computers.

Cyber attacks, terrorism, irreversable climate change, atomic weapons - these are the fruits of our scientific experiments, just as much as convenience and speed; or, as George Ohsawa said, "The bigger the front, the bigger the back".

We need to study the "laws of world-creation and world-maintenance" more than ever before, because if we don't, we will destroy our own home. And it could happen sooner than we think.

One of the workings of Nature, which science has not so far proved but which Gurdjieff taught, is the necessity of receiving certain vibrations from organic life, and most importantly from mankind. The vibrations in question are those released involuntarily at death. They can, however, be created and released voluntarily in our lifetime if we work on ourselves, and - as Jesus taught - learn to "die to ourselves".

If Nature receives insufficient vibrations of this type, which Gurdjieff says is needed to feed the atmosphere of the Moon and possibly to facilitate other processes as yet unknown to us, then she will cause large numbers of deaths to take place.

With this teaching, Gurdjieff anticipated by many years the "Gaia" hypothesis of James Lovelock; that the Earth is a living organism, acting and reacting to our presence, intent on preserving her own existence and that of Nature.

We have seen in our lifetime huge natural and human disasters. The bombing of the Twin Towers on 9/11, devastating earthquakes around the world, the biggest hurricanes ever seen, and the unimaginably huge catastrophe which claimed the lives of more than 250,000 people around the Indian Ocean in the Boxing Day tsunami, all released these very fine spiritual substances by their destructive effects on human beings.

The terrorist attacks are manmade, of course, caused by the misapplication of religion and abetted by mechanical interplanetary influences, but others are caused by Nature alone. And the scale of disasters is increasing.

Gurdjieff points out that if sufficient people were conscious, then such loss of life would not be necessary. With beautiful symmetry, he is saying, if we work on ourselves in accordance with his teachings, which are akin to the inner teachings of all the great religions, then we benefit ourselves, we benefit Nature, and we lighten the sufferings of God.

What a awe-inspiring teaching - and how timely.

The concomitant inner evolution that may take place as we grow in consciousness reflects the orderly state of the greater cosmos. Gurdjieff tells us that we must become to our own inner world what the Sun is in relation to the solar system. The Sun, mystically, symbolizes Christ, the creator and maintainer of the universe. We can achieve authority over our own inner universe by imitating Him and working on ourselves.

And we must also create a "Moon" in our inner world, a permanent centre of gravity governing our actions, an inner point of growth and stability towards which our work efforts can contribute.

If we work on ourselves according to the precept given in the Third Striving, our growth will be assisted - and so will the evolution of the Universe.

Mrs. Pogson taught that each one of us may become a cell in the mystical Body of Christ. We can, if we choose, become incorporated into - "eaten by" - something higher.

If we do not, we will still contribute when we die, but this will be an involuntary contribution, a sort of tax on living that will be exacted without our consent.

And, Gurdjieff said, organic life on Earth is an experiment; the Sun wants something from us, some contribution in return for giving us our existence; and if we do not work on ourselves, then the experiment may fail.

The Five Being-Obligolnian Strivings: (2) To Have a Constant and Unflagging Instinctive Need to Perfect Oneself in the Sense of Being

The Second Striving seems at first to be either relatively easy or impossible to attain. Reading it at a superficial level, we might believe that we already have this need, and that we can "skip over" pondering what this striving really means.

Or else we read it carefully and perhaps fear we will never achieve a "constant and unflagging" need to perfect ourselves in the Sense of Being.

Because we can't be perfect. Of course not. None of us is. How can we possibly think that we could one day perfect ourselves, in the way in which Gurdjieff means it here, that is to attain an increase in our level of Being?

We are so very far from that state.

Beginners in the Work may start to lose heart here, because we all know that there is not one single area of our life or our personal Work in which we've reached anything approaching perfection.

We take snapshots of ourselves throughout the day, and what we see - when we are being honest - is how very often we fail. How faulty our centres are, and how they interfere with one another. How we forget our aim at every moment, and miss the task we've been set. And what a long way we have to go before we become even a reasonably well functioning machine, let alone a man or woman of real Being.

Perfectionism is one of the traits we need to overcome, anyway. It's part of False Personality for many of us, and a very harmful part. It can cause us to want to hide our mistakes, to pretend to be better than we are, to exaggerate our achievements to ourselves and in Work groups, and perhaps even to God.

Gurdjieff calls this sort of attempt making a "hot air pie". And what a wonderful image that is! I visualize this large, literally flaky creation, based on nothing at all but air, collapsing at the first puff of reality - and then I see the futility of my attempts to hide from myself, to put on a mask of good behaviour or understanding that is so easily destroyed by a blast of the truth.

For me personally, perfectionism was one of my pitfalls, and I'd like to share my story with you here to illustrate how overcoming perfectionism as a trait is important to seeking "perfection, in the sense of Being".

Often belittled as a child, I had no confidence in my ability to write, and yet my Essence loved to create, and I would spend every moment of my free time writing, painting or composing music. I couldn't see the point of much of my schoolwork, and instead was often told off for dreaming when I was mulling over my next poem.

When one day I was offered the chance to become a cub reporter on an American newspaper, I grabbed it with both hands. Despite my father's warnings that I was useless as a writer and would never make it to publication, I was determined that I would give it my best shot. In those early days, I believed it was what I had been created to do, and that even if I failed I owed it to myself and to God to at least try.

Every day I worked painstakingly on my news stories and features, making sure I used reliable sources for my facts, backed them up with suitable quotations, gave both sides of a story, and presented the information in an interesting, readable style.

I never felt my stories were ready to publish, but at five every afternoon, ready or not, off they went to the editor. I would wait with trepidation, fearing I would be told to rewrite, be scolded for my inadequacy, or even given my notice.

But it didn't happen! Though very far from perfect, my work was good enough. And seeing that I could, after all, be useful while imperfect, I began to let the super-critical, negative, perfectionist I's die away until eventually they barely ever surfaced.

My teacher explained that to silence these and other useless I's in False Personality I had to draw the feeling of "I" out of them. To do this with attention was the only way to avoid being dominated by them. I found that when I did so I seemed to have more room within myself, as it were, more freedom.  When I observed myself and eventually began to remember myself I came under fewer laws. I was living more like a three-brained being, and less like a malfunctioning machine.

As, over the years, I became better at my craft, my aim gradually changed and became linked to my work on myself. I realized that sometimes - perhaps only seldom, it was true - my talent could be used by something higher.

For along with my enjoyment of writing I had, like many reporters, a strongly idealistic streak. I wanted my work to do some good, to help people, to increase the amount of truth and understanding in the world. Gradually I began to apply these ideals to every story I wrote, but I knew I often failed to achieve them.

And yet it was just this sense of inadequacy, of failure to meet my aim, that most helped me to grow in Being.

When I began to read St. Therese of Lisieux, she showed me how important it was to offer all I had done, along with all my failures, imperfections and mistakes, to God - Conscious Humanity - at the end of each day.

The acknowledgment of my own littleness was sometimes all I did have to offer. But that itself - a form of humility - is often the most pleasing thing we can offer God, because it is the start of becoming teachable, of being able one day to really work on oneself,

Looking at this Second Striving, then, it's clear to me today that it doesn't mean what I initially mistook it to be - a demand to become quite perfect in every way. We can't do this, and we're not expected to. Jesus tells us to be perfect, just as our Heavenly Father is perfect, but again, like Gurdjieff, He is talking about our quest for spiritual perfection, not perfection in the sense of doing everything supremely well.

Spiritual perfection grows from humility, from just this acknowledgment of my creaturely nature, that I will never attain great heights but that I can accept my failures, continue to struggle, and make work efforts.

The call to make such efforts comes from within, and the longer we are in the Work, really in it as opposed to just turning up for meetings and reading the books, the stronger and more persistent is the call.

Sometimes it's called a "taste". We acquire a taste for truth, for honesty, for humility. Our Buried Conscience begins to awaken, and it slowly and benignly starts to overcome our sleep. We know when we have gone too long without working, and we start to sense when we need to make greater efforts.

Those efforts must come from that inner call, that sensing. We can't impose effort from without, or at least not for very long. In the beginning this is necessary, but after a while we begin to feel for ourselves whenever we have gone a long time without working on ourselves, and we dislike the staleness that results.

Our Essence has come from God, and to God it longs to return. As St Augustine says, "Thou has made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in thee".

And once we have begun the pilgrimage to the Sacred Centre, that urge may indeed become "constant and unflagging", just as the Second Striving describes.

And one day, with prayer and effort, we may actually reach a higher state of Being. That is the goal towards which we are all working, and Gurdjieff tells us here that it is attainable.

The Five Being-Obligolnian Strivings: (1) To have in their ordinary being-existence everything satisfying and really necessary for their planetary body

The Five Being-Obligolnian Strivings offer us an overview of what the Work teaches in regard to our existence on this planet: our purpose, aim and direction as three-brained beings, as seen from the viewpoint of "Grandfather Beelzebub" - Gurdjieff himself.

The first of these strivings seems self-explanatory. In the phrase "to have in their ordinary
 being-existence everything satisfying and really necessary for their planetary body" Gurdjieff is apparently saying that we need to have our most basic needs met before any genuine spiritual work can begin.

Apparently.

But nothing Gurdjieff says is ever really that simple.

Taking a superficial view, we might see the strivings as being something like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which says that we must have our requirements for food, clothing and shelter met before anything higher can be sought. Eventually, in Maslow's theory, the human being may meet the highest level of need, that for "self-actualization", but Maslow's description of this state is sketchy at best, and it's been the subject of much theorizing. In any case, "self-actualization" is not the ultimate goal of the Work. We must ask "which self are we trying to actualize?" And without the recognition that we are not one but many, that final goal can never be achieved.

One of the chief goals of the Work, and therefore of each person trying to practice it, is to increase our consciousness to such an extent that we may participate in the redeeming, renewing work of God and Conscious Humanity. This takes us way beyond mere psychology and into the realm of the spirit.

The five strivings do seem to offer a guide to ascending levels of Being, the most basic of which the Work says is to become a Good Householder, an obyvatel. The first striving describes the way of life of such a person, but it is far from clear exactly what Gurdjieff is implying here. As he intended, we need to study each section of "All and Everything" many times before hazarding a conclusion that this or that is what he "meant" to say.

Our planetary body is our instrument for manifesting our consciousness on Earth. For some people, simply having food, clothing and shelter would be a distant goal, and I think that implicit in the overall Five Strivings may be the need for us all to be conscious of what our neighbour may lack - even if that "neighbour" is thousands of miles distant.

But taking it at the simplest level, it's obvious that each one of us needs to start our personal Work from the position of having these most basic needs already met. We may not own our own home - Gurdjieff never did - but we must have somewhere to live that gives us shelter from the elements, a reasonably comfortable place to eat, sleep and work, and which we may occupy in relative peace without worrying at every moment that we may be evicted.

We also need to have appropriate food.

But here, too, we know that in the Work three types of food are necessary for our personal development, indeed for our very existence to continue: physical food for the body, the food of air, and the food of impressions.

Physical food is easy to understand - it's simply what we eat, what we put into our stomach to meet our physical needs. Exactly what those needs are will vary with age, situation, health and so on. As I've written in previous posts, we do best when we eat "mindfully", according to the needs of our moving/instinctive centre. Whether that means a vegetarian or omnivorous diet will depend on our physical constitution, our genetic inheritance, together with the needs of our current situation. We can study nutrition with our Intellectual Centre, but the best guidance will come from our own intuitions and instincts when we have observed ourselves for long enough to become aware of the difference between what is a real intuition and what is imagination.

Gurdjieff knew well the importance of eating mindfully. His dinners were legendary, offering almost every type of food you could imagine. Spices, herbs, sauces and rare delicacies from all over the world found their way on to his table, for the benefit of his extremely fortunate companions. He was an excellent chef, and understood the properties of each of the foods he prepared. We can all follow his example here.

Personally, I love cooking, and when I'm feeding others I enjoy the positive emotions associated with being a Good Householder and providing them with what they need and will enjoy, as well as taking the best care possible of my own planetary body.

But beyond physical food there is the food of air and that of impressions: being aware of the breath and trying to live somewhere where the air is pure enough to be of benefit is important to our state of health. The food of air combines with the food of the stomach to create certain hydrogens, necessary for the continuation of life.  And when we work on ourselves, we bring consciousness to the assimilation of impressions, which then extends the amount and increases the quality of the higher hydrogens available to us. When we remember ourselves, and especially in the morning exercise, we combine the three being-foods so as to maximize their potentials within us and help us to become more conscious. The Food Diagram shows exactly what happens.

We all need to feed on impressions, without which we would die, just as surely as if we were suffocated or starved.

But the work of remembering ourselves creates a different quality of Being. It is not strictly necessary for our continued existence, but it is vital if we are to progress in the Work. Higher states of consciousness depend on the existence of the appropriate hydrogens in our planetary body, and the science of combining the three types of being-food could be said to be the very heart of the Work.

And the quality of the impressions we receive also needs attention. We don't watch violent or pornographic films or television programmes, for example, not because of an externally imposed morality but because they are coarse and degrading, and don't support the growth of consciousness. For the same reason, we monitor the impressions we give ourselves in our inner and outer talking; we avoid gossiping, criticizing and judging others. We don't want to feed our consciousness on such negative impressions, which encourage the growth of I's in False Personality at the expense of Essence. We want to nourish Essence and starve False Personality, and must carefully choose the food of impressions with that aim in mind.

So we take care over the music we listen to, the pictures we put on our walls, the books we read, the people with whom we associate. We want to take in the very highest quality of impressions available to us, and to do so we need an environment which will support our personal Work, an Essence-nourishing environment. That has little to do with money, and everything to do with awareness and aim.

Such apparently insignificant factors as the fabrics and colours we choose to wear are also of interest. Wearing cotton, wool or silk gives the body a finer impression and enhances health more than wearing manmade fibres, and the harmony of the colours we carry on our body will influence our emotions and those of other people.  We do this not out of vanity but out of the wish to assimilate finer impressions, and if possible give others the chance to do so.

When we eat, we eat; we don't read, watch the news, or listen to rap music!

 Our meals should be occasions for really nourishing ourselves on every level, including feeding our Essence. If we're lucky enough to eat with others, our conversation should be as life-enhancing and supportive as the food we serve. Meals are not the right time for disputes or controversies. Putting flowers on the table, using the best quality china and silverware we can afford, appreciating the efforts made by those who cooked the meal, if we ourselves didn't prepare it: all these should be included in our consciousness as we eat.

Saying Grace before meals is a very beneficial practice. We express our gratitude towards God and Conscious Humanity, who have given us our lives and the chance to become conscious, who have made it possible for us to enjoy the food we eat and the food we offer to others. All these are unmerited gifts.

Essence loves new impressions, hence the popularity of foreign travel. So we should change our surroundings from time to time, visit new places, listen to music we're unfamiliar with, try new foods. Reading challenging books also offers the chance for our Intellectual Centre to grow, giving it the difficult food that will help it.

And if we patiently work on ourselves day by day, we may eventually reach a state where all impressions fall directly on Essence. This is a highly desirable goal, because if this happens, then Gurdjieff tells us the result will be "everything more vivid".

All this, and more, is implied in fulfilling the first Striving.