Going over the collection of my essays that are soon to be published, I was struck by a constant theme that I had not been totally aware of: that we live our lives as if asleep. We are buffeted by events that rock our world just as dreams do in sleep, even though dreams, as far as our current thought goes, are entirely created by us. I do not extend this to a belief that we can manipulate life as we should be able to manipulate dreams, but more simply that we are largely unaware of the nature of the world in which we are a part. We don’t understand that we have dumbed ourselves down to the small and particular, our concern focused on the incidental and the social while all around us is mystery: infinite space and time, death, creation, the forever unexplained. Our life might not be exactly as a dream, but like a dream in that we ignore the more important facts of it for the particular and the relatively unimportant. In this then, as in dreams, we are puppets to a seeming master who pulls these little strings to confuse us just as real life passes us by.
Who is this master? Why are we so easily distracted? In the classic book of hidden knowledge (as opposed to the “occult,” which is now associated with satanic venues) by P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, we are led to believe that these and other eternal questions can be answered by the inscrutable Armenian trickster, G.I. Gurdieff. Still stuck on page 89, I have not yet found those answers in full (and will probably be only tickled by possibilities, as is the habit of Gurdjieff) but have been practically run over again and again by this same idea -that we are asleep, mere puppets of cosmic law. But no, even worse: although I believe it is due to his showmanship, Gurdieff (through Oupensky) insists that we are not only asleep, but are machines, total automatons with no will or volition of our own. I have not been let in on the puppet master yet, but have learned of his strings: the natural movement of the cosmos. Gurdieff believed that, for instance, the perturbations caused by, say, Mars coming closer to Jupiter in its orbit could rain holy hell down here on earth. In this case, Gurdeiff was speaking to Oupensky at a café in St Petersburg during WW1, where he went so far as to state that the war was pre-determined by such cosmic movements and that nothing at all could have been done to prevent it. Except one thing, that is: to become awake using Gurdieff’s special methods, which were not to come cheaply. Gurdieff, the author explained, was not to be held back in poverty.
Putting the charlatan issue aside, it seems to me that Gurdieff was more right than wrong, simply being more over-the-top than necessary. I came to think of Gurdjeff and his message over these last several days as my son and I spent time at the cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (it was this that got me stuck on page 89). We got to talking about Pan-European culture and how it seemed to be annihilating itself in Western Europe with the massive importation of Muslims who were not interested in assimilation, and why this was so. My son believed it was all about the destruction of traditional culture so that the state could gain more control. I did not disagree, but made some refinements: it was not about the leadership; they, for the most part, believed that what they were doing was a good and moral thing. Rather, it was about the impetus behind the culture. Looking back on history, it is not that Euro-culture is trying to commit suicide, but rather that it has taken a different tack for greater world assimilation that is so well-hidden that it seems the reverse. The logic behind it is that Euro-culture is so powerful that it will, in time, transform the great masses of Muslims now in or heading to Europe, and in that, will cause them to export their own transformation back to their native lands. This is the only way such a conversion might take place.
The trouble with this, I pointed out, is that this might be like the pig and the python problem, an idea that had struck me from a picture book from my childhood. Here, in some place like Burma, a python had slithered into a pig pen and swallowed an entire pig. Trouble is, once swallowed, the python could not leave the pen, and was thus open to the later fatal machete blows of the pig’s owner. It had bitten off more than it could handle – just as Euro-culture might be doing. Islam, after all, has an agenda of its own.
Who swallows who and so on, time will tell, but I was reminded of Gurdjieff by the idea that the leaders who are transforming Europe and probably the world have no idea why they are really doing what they are doing. They are puppets of culture, which is running the show behind a curtain. But who or what is behind the curtain creating this cultural momentum? And how can we pull it aside to throw out the puppet master and reclaim our lives?
Perhaps I will find the secret in this book, although I doubt it – not because it will not be in this book, but because, as Gurdieff himself put it, because I am not ready to understand his take on it all. But this problem has already been explained by the Great Religions and perhaps by ALL religions. Most agree that we are ignorant of what is really running our lives, and of what life is really all about. Many tell us, too, that we are living in a kind of dream, just as Jesus pleaded with his Abba, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” It is true, then - from Gurdieff to cultural theory to Christ and the Buddha – that we know not what we do, and in that we are ignorant puppets. The religions seem to vary on the whys and who’s, but in the end, the wise all agree: we are, both individually and as a collective, deaf and blind. And each tells us how we might deliver ourselves from this ignorance.
Which brings us back to my book on essays, for there is something else in them that speaks of my own ignorance that is in plain sight – the concept of coincidence. So many of the essays speak of coincidence, but if we think about it, coincidence really only equals ignorance. If we knew what was going on, coincidence would not be a mystery. Such oddities, in our new framework, would be seen to run by a certain logic, and in that have a certain predictability.
I do not believe that we are total puppets. On this, I disagree with Gurdieff, and am more in line with the religions that posit free will even in the throes of ignorance, for religion could not give us solutions if we could not use them. Boiling it all down, our superficial daily mind is not divorced from reality, but rather is as said, superficial. We might picture the conscious as part of a greater mind that is the unconscious, which is part of a greater mind which is the cosmic, which is part of the Great Mind that we have chosen to call God. None are divorced from the other, but one is hidden from the other behind modes of comprehension, functioning as it seems from behind a curtain. Looking back on the Europe problem, Carl Jung called the cultural mind the archetypal conscious, but it didn’t stop there: he also had to admit to even more inclusive rings of influence which even he could not comprehend – until he faded into a sort of mystical wisdom in his old age.
I believe that we can talk to these other “rings” in prayer and in meditation, the former humbling our conscious mode, the latter leaving space for the different modes to talk back to us. I do not think that we can then twist reality to our desires as we understand it, but we should be able to free ourselves of the puppet strings. With greater knowledge, these should not appear to be puppet strings at all, but rather new laws that operate as clearly to us as, say, the law of gravity. We can then make clear choices – until, in the end, our choices will always be the same as God’s, for what other choices could be more true?
We might avoid fate, then, with certain introspection. We might avoid being the pig or the python or the man with the machete. Or we can wait and see how divine law percolates through the far realm in which we find ourselves, and hope that prayer will be enough. FK
Who is this master? Why are we so easily distracted? In the classic book of hidden knowledge (as opposed to the “occult,” which is now associated with satanic venues) by P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, we are led to believe that these and other eternal questions can be answered by the inscrutable Armenian trickster, G.I. Gurdieff. Still stuck on page 89, I have not yet found those answers in full (and will probably be only tickled by possibilities, as is the habit of Gurdjieff) but have been practically run over again and again by this same idea -that we are asleep, mere puppets of cosmic law. But no, even worse: although I believe it is due to his showmanship, Gurdieff (through Oupensky) insists that we are not only asleep, but are machines, total automatons with no will or volition of our own. I have not been let in on the puppet master yet, but have learned of his strings: the natural movement of the cosmos. Gurdieff believed that, for instance, the perturbations caused by, say, Mars coming closer to Jupiter in its orbit could rain holy hell down here on earth. In this case, Gurdeiff was speaking to Oupensky at a café in St Petersburg during WW1, where he went so far as to state that the war was pre-determined by such cosmic movements and that nothing at all could have been done to prevent it. Except one thing, that is: to become awake using Gurdieff’s special methods, which were not to come cheaply. Gurdieff, the author explained, was not to be held back in poverty.
Putting the charlatan issue aside, it seems to me that Gurdieff was more right than wrong, simply being more over-the-top than necessary. I came to think of Gurdjeff and his message over these last several days as my son and I spent time at the cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (it was this that got me stuck on page 89). We got to talking about Pan-European culture and how it seemed to be annihilating itself in Western Europe with the massive importation of Muslims who were not interested in assimilation, and why this was so. My son believed it was all about the destruction of traditional culture so that the state could gain more control. I did not disagree, but made some refinements: it was not about the leadership; they, for the most part, believed that what they were doing was a good and moral thing. Rather, it was about the impetus behind the culture. Looking back on history, it is not that Euro-culture is trying to commit suicide, but rather that it has taken a different tack for greater world assimilation that is so well-hidden that it seems the reverse. The logic behind it is that Euro-culture is so powerful that it will, in time, transform the great masses of Muslims now in or heading to Europe, and in that, will cause them to export their own transformation back to their native lands. This is the only way such a conversion might take place.
The trouble with this, I pointed out, is that this might be like the pig and the python problem, an idea that had struck me from a picture book from my childhood. Here, in some place like Burma, a python had slithered into a pig pen and swallowed an entire pig. Trouble is, once swallowed, the python could not leave the pen, and was thus open to the later fatal machete blows of the pig’s owner. It had bitten off more than it could handle – just as Euro-culture might be doing. Islam, after all, has an agenda of its own.
Who swallows who and so on, time will tell, but I was reminded of Gurdjieff by the idea that the leaders who are transforming Europe and probably the world have no idea why they are really doing what they are doing. They are puppets of culture, which is running the show behind a curtain. But who or what is behind the curtain creating this cultural momentum? And how can we pull it aside to throw out the puppet master and reclaim our lives?
Perhaps I will find the secret in this book, although I doubt it – not because it will not be in this book, but because, as Gurdieff himself put it, because I am not ready to understand his take on it all. But this problem has already been explained by the Great Religions and perhaps by ALL religions. Most agree that we are ignorant of what is really running our lives, and of what life is really all about. Many tell us, too, that we are living in a kind of dream, just as Jesus pleaded with his Abba, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” It is true, then - from Gurdieff to cultural theory to Christ and the Buddha – that we know not what we do, and in that we are ignorant puppets. The religions seem to vary on the whys and who’s, but in the end, the wise all agree: we are, both individually and as a collective, deaf and blind. And each tells us how we might deliver ourselves from this ignorance.
Which brings us back to my book on essays, for there is something else in them that speaks of my own ignorance that is in plain sight – the concept of coincidence. So many of the essays speak of coincidence, but if we think about it, coincidence really only equals ignorance. If we knew what was going on, coincidence would not be a mystery. Such oddities, in our new framework, would be seen to run by a certain logic, and in that have a certain predictability.
I do not believe that we are total puppets. On this, I disagree with Gurdieff, and am more in line with the religions that posit free will even in the throes of ignorance, for religion could not give us solutions if we could not use them. Boiling it all down, our superficial daily mind is not divorced from reality, but rather is as said, superficial. We might picture the conscious as part of a greater mind that is the unconscious, which is part of a greater mind which is the cosmic, which is part of the Great Mind that we have chosen to call God. None are divorced from the other, but one is hidden from the other behind modes of comprehension, functioning as it seems from behind a curtain. Looking back on the Europe problem, Carl Jung called the cultural mind the archetypal conscious, but it didn’t stop there: he also had to admit to even more inclusive rings of influence which even he could not comprehend – until he faded into a sort of mystical wisdom in his old age.
I believe that we can talk to these other “rings” in prayer and in meditation, the former humbling our conscious mode, the latter leaving space for the different modes to talk back to us. I do not think that we can then twist reality to our desires as we understand it, but we should be able to free ourselves of the puppet strings. With greater knowledge, these should not appear to be puppet strings at all, but rather new laws that operate as clearly to us as, say, the law of gravity. We can then make clear choices – until, in the end, our choices will always be the same as God’s, for what other choices could be more true?
We might avoid fate, then, with certain introspection. We might avoid being the pig or the python or the man with the machete. Or we can wait and see how divine law percolates through the far realm in which we find ourselves, and hope that prayer will be enough. FK
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