Being Tested in the Work

Anyone on a real spiritual path has to face tests. The Work is no exception. If you are truly working on yourself, you will be tested again and again until the Work becomes stronger in you than any other influence.

The nature of these tests changes throughout your life.

The earliest test may come as a difficulty in locating a teacher. You may find a meeting time or place that is really difficult for you to get to, or which demands a sacrifice of something you enjoy. For me, the first meeting I went to was 50 miles away from where I lived, and as a penniless student I had great difficulty in coming up with the train fare. There were many evenings when I was tempted not to go; but I wanted the Work so much that I found ways to get there in spite of the many problems.

Having overcome the first difficulty, you now find you're being asked to carry out tasks that you really, really don't like! Why should you have to miss a night's sleep, for example? Or dress up as something weird and unpleasant? Or trek miles and miles to a distant Work location for a special weekend? How can you be asked to do these things? Don't they know how hard you're trying and how difficult they're making things for you?

Of course "they" do!

The purpose of all these difficulties is to show you your different I's. You don't know what you're really like until you are tested, and I's which have become habitual and which you don't even know you have start making their presence felt.

The Work proceeds from the outer to the inner, from the surface to the depths. What are you willing to sacrifice for the sake of the Work? And what do you believe you can never, ever give up?

Whatever your problems, you are facing the same process that we all go through. We have to get to know ourselves thoroughly, and the only way we can do this is by observation. And, since we habitually take the easy path through any situation, it's only through having to deny our habitual I's their sleep that we can see ourselves as we really are.

Without excuses. Without justifying. And without lying.

Our unpleasant habits in all centres come out to parade themselves. We begin to see that we are not exactly the nice, kind, pleasant person we thought we were. Far from it.

In life, when faced with a difficulty, we choose the path of least resistance. We try to get our own way, and when that doesn't work we manipulate or force others into doing what we want. In the Work we can't get away with this sort of behaviour. Our fellow students are sure to object, and our teacher won't allow us to become lazy or to make excuses for our unpleasant manifestations.

Tests cause us to look ever deeper within, and we start to have a pretty good idea of what we're really like.

Just as important as this knowledge is what we do with it. We don't justify our shortcomings, but own up to them. We see ourselves as we really are, and we don't flinch from observing our buffers, our contradictions, our conceit, our arrogance. If we refuse to see, we will be tested again and again on the very same point until we can no longer deny our reality.

Neither do we judge or criticize ourselves, however. Such an attitude shuts down all observation and puts us to sleep. We simply see ourselves, acknowledge our various I's, and choose to disidentify with them so that they gradually lose their power over us. With this test comes much suffering, but it is the type of suffering which cleanses and enlightens us. It is the only way we learn.

The Work shows us that nothing in our False Personality is worth anything at all. It has to go. All those I's which stifle our Essence and commit psychological violence against ourselves and others have to be let go and allowed to die away. It will take a long time, perhaps many years, for this to happen.

An important part of the process of becoming aware is to get to know our Chief Feature. Dr. Nicoll describes it as the axis round which our False Personality revolves, and when we have seen it our Work becomes more focused.

Even so, it is very easy for the Chief Feature to take on new forms, and this is the origin of the many stories all over the world about shape-shifters. These fairy tales reflect the truth that our I's are experts at disguising themselves, and only continuous self-observation without judging or excusing will subdue their influence.

Self-observation goes on for the rest of our life. And if we become complacent, thinking we now know everything about ourselves and that our False Personality has no more power over us, we are sure to be tested, perhaps in a very big way. The saying that "Pride goes before a fall", which is actually a quotation from the Bible, is quite true. You will observe it in yourself many times.

If you are ever authorized to teach the Work, you will be sure to face a major test. You will be challenged in every way, so that your False Personality is revealed in all its manifestations; this is an inescapable fact for everyone who reaches a certain stage in the Work.

Not everyone can or should be authorized to teach, but if you reach the stage of knowledge which shows your own teacher that you might be able to pass on some of the Work to new students, your Being will be tested so that you see what you have to work on in yourself.  Without this, you would be a terrible teacher! You would teach from False Personality, and this is a great pitfall.

If your teacher sees that this is happening, you will be immediately told to stop teaching; your authorization will be revoked, and you will have to take a long, hard look at the I's which have allowed such a difficult situation to develop. Some people cannot face this task, and leave the Work at this point. Their False Personalities, or even their Personalities, take them away from the Work altogether. This stage is an initiation, and only students who truly value the Work, who can see the good of the Work regardless of their own progress, or lack of it, will be able to carry on.

At this point, only humility will keep you in the Work - the sort of humility which enables you to be taught, and thus to teach others.

False Personality, as we know, has no place in the Work, but what of the Personality? In fact, our Personality probably contains a number of I's which are useful in the Work. In my case I had learned to teach and to counsel in life, and when used in a Work group these I's were often helpful. But there is still much in the Personality that will have to be discarded because it doesn't support the Work.

It is your Higher Centers which will guide you through all the tests you face in the Work. And this will only be the case when you have purified your emotional and intellectual centres sufficiently to allow the Higher Centers to be heard.

When you reach this stage, your self-knowledge will be very thorough indeed. You will still be tested, because this process continues for our lifetime as long as we are treading the path of the Work, but the tests will be very different.

There will be subtle inner temptations and outer problems which make working on the third line of the Work extremely difficult at times. But by now you will know yourself well enough to be able to meet these tests as they arise.

You will have been turned and twisted and bent out of shape so many times that you will have developed the ability to return to the sure path of the Work.  And this is the purpose of all the tests you have undergone.

Strengthening Essence

In most people, Essence is born childlike and weak.

The part of us that we call Essence is born with us. It includes everything that we are physically - our colouring, our inherited weaknesses and strengths, all our genetic heritage - and all our spiritual and psychological potential.

Just because we have that potential at birth, however, does not mean that we will develop and realize it.

Many people die without having developed their Essence at all. In such a case, Dr Nicoll taught, the very fine substance of which Essence is composed returns to the common melting pot, from which new Essences are taken when a person is to be born.

If we do not develop Essence, we have no individuality. If there is no individuality, how can there be any survival after death?

This is not what the church teaches, of course. It is a very ancient tradition, older than the church, and known to esoteric groups before Christianity existed.

If someone is born into a family which follows a traditional religion, that person will begin to develop Essence. To be a spiritual person, to follow any of the real religious paths, one has to resist temptation, to work against what is mechanical and strengthen the spiritual will.

For this reason, all the religions which Gurdjieff recognized do teach belief in a soul, or developed Essence. The soul is nourished when a child is raised by people who genuinely try to follow a religious path, and who guide the child wisely so that he or she will detach from negative emotions, at least to some extent.

If efforts are made during childhood and adolescence, then even if the maturing adult decides to discard their religion, the soul will have begun to grow, thanks to the nourishment it received from the parents and other adults in childhood.

And when the soul has once begun to grow, it will call out to the inner man or woman and crave more nourishment, more strength, as it recognizes its own desire for development.

Society is so disordered today, however, that few people receive wise guidance as children, and even fewer recognize their inner longings once childhood is past. Instead, we are encouraged to forget about spiritual progress and focus on material goals - money, status, power, sexual satisfaction, and so on. This is what drives the money-making machinery of advertising and big business. This is the real danger of our day.

We live in a haze of lies, a web of falsehood which surrounds us during our waking moments and invades our dreams.  We are told the way to happiness lies in getting more and more stuff, having bigger and better orgasms, being feted as a "celebrity" in the media, or simply by satisfying all our physical needs as though we were merely animals.

If we were not kept hypnotized in this way, nobody would believe the obvious lies inherent in our materialistic society. We would refuse to buy those things we really don't want or need. We would see other people as they really are, instead of through a distorting lens of False Personality. We would keep in mind the fact of our own death, and the need to make constant, unflagging efforts during our brief lifetime.

In short, we would work on ourselves.

Even in those times when there is no Fourth Way School, echoes of former schools persist. There is always a mystical side to outer religions, and a path that may be found by a sincere seeker. And it is only when treading that path that we experience the real satisfaction that a pilgrim knows even when he or she is suffering, the knowledge that we are moving ever closer to our Real I, whatever name it may be given. And this experience is the same for all spiritual seekers, everywhere. The inner teachings of all religions all embrace the same reality.

Today, we have the Fourth Way, and the teachers and groups that exist in the authorized lineages of the Work.

We know that by working on ourselves we are strengthening Essence and weakening Personality, and this is the task that is most strongly encouraged during Lent.

Of False Personality there is no need to speak, for we all realize that it is the fake, the unreal, the delusional system of I's that leads us away from the Work unless we stay awake. We know how to recognize these I's, and we understand that we must detach from them whenever they make themselves known.

The Personality does have its uses in the Work, however.  We need to use Personality I's in order to carry out our jobs, to provide for ourselves and our families, and to organize our lives so that inner work takes priority once our responsibilities to others have been discharged.

We know that it is the task of Personality to serve Essence. Personality must create the conditions our Essence needs in order to grow. Essence must not remain weak and childlike, for if it fails to develop there can be no inner peace, no real progress. Progress takes place as the Work penetrates deeper within us, from the outermost I's in moving parts of centres to the innermost places where the Work is difficult and painstaking - but where alone real awakening can occur.

In the Christian religion we are told that Jesus withdrew to the wilderness to prepare for his earthly mission. We can't do that - most of us have family responsibilities and worldly duties that we have to carry out.

But we can all set aside periods at the beginning of each day, during the day, and again in the evening, when we carry out a psychological reversal and focus on our inner tasks. This is why we have a Morning Preparation every day, and why we choose to make appointments with ourselves in the day; we need to know where we are in our inner world, and what we need to do next for our spiritual progress.

During Lent we are encouraged by the Work and by the Christian tradition to take on extra tasks. Prayer and fasting are the names given by the church to these acts. In the Work, making Aim, putting in effort, and asking for help from a higher level constitute prayer for us. Fasting means to abstain from identifying with the I's in Personality and False Personality which spoil our inner work.

Lent is the time when, following the tradition as recommended in the Work, we may make some real progress in strengthening our Essence. And when one person ascends in the scale of Being, it affects everyone else.

Lent - What Are You Giving Up This Year?

As we've seen in previous posts, the conscious men and women who composed the cycle of the Christian Year did so out of their profound understanding of the workings of the cosmos.

Not only did they completely understand the meaning of the Christian religion and its mystical completion, they also knew of the various energies available to us on the Earth at different times of the year.

Hence, each seasonal festival, each liturgical season, encourages us to focus on a particular practice that will benefit us for the growth of our higher being bodies.

At each change of season, the Earth receives the energies appropriate to the practices appropriate to it.

Now we're entering Lent, and the energies of the cosmos which reach us now are subtly different from the preceding seasons, those of Christmas, the Epiphany and Candlemass.

We all now see and experience the great increase in light that reaches us from our Sun during late February and the beginning of March, compared to the darkness of the time before and after Christmas. We notice the changing weather patterns, and the growth of new plants which appear at the very beginning of Spring. Birds are nesting, and we sense an increased urgency to the cycles of nature now, as the currents of new life begin to pour into our Earth's biosphere.

Lent is, in fact, the ancient word for Spring, and its arrival means that we are being asked to make some sacrifice that will help to purify us for the great Easter festival which comes at the end of this 40-day period.

Traditionally, as in Advent, Orthodox Christians and, formerly, all Catholics fast from flesh foods during Lent. The exceptions are fish and dairy foods, and such a diet may in fact be the very best for our health if we're not among those whose genetic heritage demands more protein than the Lenten fare supplies. I happen to be among them, and am what is termed an "obligate carnivore", so a compete abstinence from meat and poultry is detrimental to my health.

One of the habits I gave up after I discovered this fact was that of feeling guilty because I couldn't follow a vegan or vegetarian diet! Both made me very weak and ill, and hence less fit for working on myself - but the lingering guilt was a habit of my thinking and emotional centres that I had to work on in past years.

Many of us carry around completely useless guilt and shame from past faulty thinking, whether derived from introjected parental attitudes or acquired later on from other sources, such as a perfectionist, punishing religion.

In the past, the Jansenist stream of Christianity imposed a regime of puritanism on the French Catholic community, and it took the insights of saints such as Therese of Lisieux to point out the fallacy of their philosophy.

In a very similar fashion, the original Puritan sects, and the many breakaway groups which copied them, took the attitude that all of us are miserable sinners, and deserve constant punishment for our attachments to earthly pleasures, even those of the most innocent kind. Music itself was banned from some churches, not to mention dancing.

Today there are quite a few fundamentalist churches which preach such an un-Godly approach to life in the name of spirituality. Many critical, judgmental religious writers and preachers think of God as an ill-willed magistrate in the sky, out to get you for the most minor infringement of his rules, or just bent on making sure that nobody enjoys themselves, ever!

All this is very far from Orthodox or Catholic beliefs,the only streams of Christianity which Gurdjieff sanctioned as genuine, and they are certainly not those of the Work.

Sacrificing perfectionist and judgmental habits of thought can be a very good way for many of us to work on ourselves during Lent.

The practice of self-compassion, though not in itself a spiritual discipline, can actually help us to become free of these severe attitudes, and thus help us grow in our spirituality - and that's the whole point of Lent, after all. If you're not familiar with the term, there are many websites which explain it and give help for those want to practise it, whether you're a Christian, a Buddhist or from any other religious background or none.

Paradoxically, giving up our harmful, punishing thoughts, and the behaviours that can follow, may be a very good way to "give up" something for Lent! In other words, we may "give up" giving up!

At the same time, we also want to experience the life-giving, enhancing energies of Spring which we've noted above. But there has to be a balance here, and this is the real purpose of Lent - to help us to keep a balance between two types of excess, that of self-indulgence, such as with overeating or sex addiction, and the practice of puritanical thinking.

Obviously, if someone has a serious addiction problem the practice of Lenten sacrifice won't be enough to help them give up the harmful substance or practice. Again, there's plenty of help out there, but I write this blog to help those already in recovery and especially anyone interested in the Work and in Christianity.

Living in balance, remaining conscious of the pulls exerted from both directions and yet keeping ourselves centered equally between these poles, can be the most fruitful Lenten discipline of all.

Of course, there are many harmful habits to be given up! If perfectionism and judgmentalism are not among your most pressing concerns, there's sure to be something which you need to sacrifice. Worrying, perhaps? Black and white thinking? Making accounts? Choose your habit, and decide to observe it and disidentify from it during the coming 40 days. At the end, you will be freer and happier, and all the more ready to celebrate Easter.

Whatever you choose to give up for Lent, try to select something that is mechanical and which you know is harmful to yourself and to others.

Then your preparation will bear great fruit at Easter. You will purified and freed from something which has been holding you back - maybe for many years - and stopping you from reaching your spiritual goals.