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.
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