Last week several of us who are reading Gebser’s Ever Present Origin together, shared the difficulties we encountered while reading through the description of mental structure of consciousness, specifically while reading about its exaggerated deficient form that is dominant in today’s world.
For context, some of the characteristics of this structure’s deficient form include our fixation on dividing and dissecting of everything and using much for our own selfish purposes. It includes excessive focus on abstraction and quantification that leads to isolation, to self-importance, to destruction, and to inability to distinguish what is real from what is the ‘model of the world’.
It includes complete breakage with the past, as well as lack of courage and ability to speak one’s own mind, rather than “rationally circumscribed and mass-produced attitude or viewpoint, against philosophical authorities or popular opinion”. EPO p.95
I noticed both recognition of deficient mental residing within me, as well as deep resistance to all that it represents.
I was reminded of that which is stressed across many traditions and confirmed through experience – which is: – As long as you are against something, you can not be free from it. This reminded me of the necessity to bring all to light, so that it can be acknowledged, embraced and transcended.
Cynthia writes in Wisdom Jesus: “By trying to stop the black–to make it all white, all good; by saying that this we can accept and this we must reject, you keep empowering the cycle of polarization that creates the problem in the first place. And I think this has always been the fatal trap in the “God is light” roadmap, the orientation that cleaves to the light by trying to deny or reject the shadow. It only winds up empowering the shadow and deepening it. The resolution does not lie in collapsing the tension of opposites by cancelling one of them out. Something has to go deeper, something that can hold them both.”
To explore this theme in a practical way, I invite you to join me in looking into – what is it that I am against?
What does the sensation of ‘being against’ feel in my body? Are there different sensations that ‘being against’ can bring about? For example, sensation related to fear, sensation related to anger, sensation related to resentment.
Is the sensation of being against something that I perceive as outside of me, different from sensation of being against something that is arising within?
I do not wish to change anything, just to see. It would be ironic to become against my ‘being against’. Yet, that too I may need to see.
In the Gurdjieff Work, it is often stressed that it matters not What is seen, rather, it matters that it IS seen. If the entire cosmos is mirrored within me, there is no end to what I can see.
Am I open to face my own darkness? I wish to develop a quality of my seeing. How do I engage all three centers in my seeing?
Thinking center is the overseer, the note taker. It is the other two centers that are having the experience of ‘being against’. I wish to become aware of this experience.
I wish to remind myself that contradictions are here to be endured, to be witnessed – not to be resolved, not to be overcome.
Love to all.
Rilke’s Double Realm is the poem for this week
The Double Realm
Only he who lifts his lyre
in the Underworld as well
may come back
to praising, endlessly.
Only he who has eaten
the food of the dead
will make music so clear
that even the softest tone is heard.
Though the reflection in the pool
often ripples away,
take the image within you.
Only in the double realm
do our voices carry
all they can say.
Inner Task Series by Vesna Nikolic
Vesna Nikolic posted this Inner Task Series to the Wisdom School Community on Facebook from March 12 – April 30, 2021