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PAULINE DE DAMPIERRE THE ART OF LIVING WITH ONESELF

In Meetings with Remarkable Men, Dean Borsh puts to Gurdjieffs father the question: Where is God just now? And theanswer that Gurdjieffsfather gives is, He is in a forest making double ladders and on the tops of them he is fixing happiness,so that individual people and whole nations might ascend and descend.

[There is] a double movement of life in ourselves: the current that carries our usual materialist life and another more

conscious life. . .

If we really study the history of civilizations, we will see that this vision of the two currents always had to be worked for andkept alive. There were periods when it was strong and radiant and others when it vanished and had to be rediscovered. Andso, perhaps, what in fact has been lost today is the exact understanding of the necessity for human beings to establish thisright relationship within themselves. In any case, these two processes are always there and their existence sounds a callwithin us. They sound a call because the materialistic life is not enough for man, and, when he is sincere with himself, heknows this. He feels a certain lack, something is missing. He may try to fill this emphasis by turning more and more towardthe material aspectbut the call remains.

So today Gurdjieff comes to our Western civilization to reanimate this understanding. And for that he brings a new language.He doesnt speak to us of sin and virtue, or punishment and forgiveness. He speaks to us first of all about our sleep, ourmechanicalness, and calls us to awaken and to discover what he calls our being-duty, our obligation to the universe and to ourown being. . .

A New Kind of Hope

We do not see that what we accept as real with our minds and what we actually live by are usually quite different things. Wemay try to find truth in books, in philosophy, but the sense of reality only comes to us through what we actually experience inour lives. We are constantly involved in an outer life which, with all its dangers and attractions, draws us, because it gives usthe feeling that we exist. We constantly feel compelled to respond to that life and its demands. We may very well admit thatanother kind of life is possible, that there are other capacities within us. But if we experience no trace of this in the world weactually live in, it will never be real for us. It will simply remain an insubstantial ideal, which we know we should pursue some day, but not right now.

But if, one day, we find ourselves face to face with someone who is actually connected to these capacities in himself, who isable to let them act in his lifewhich we can see for ourselves is a powerful life full of meaningthat can have an enormous

influence on us because it opens us to something quite different in ourselves, which we have never experienced before andwhich gives us a deeper sense of our own existence. Then a new kind of hope arises within us. . .

Ones Career in Life

What is truly useful is to be able to accept that ones limitations in outer life can act as a hindrance to engaging in the search.Its very hard to accept this, but I can tell you that this acceptance can give an extraordinary impulse for development to b oththe inner and the outer life.

As to the question of what kind of work to choose, there is no ready-made answer. It depends. A person should examine thesituation and consider why he might decide to do this or that. But on the whole it can be said that we need a relationship withthe outer world. We need to find something to do that we care about. We need to be appreciated, we need to feel useful, to feelthat what we do has a value.

It is not an easy challenge in a society which is not made for this inner work, which doesnt understand anything about it,where people spend all their energy on their careers. So how to manage?

Those who really accept the challenge will have to find a way to their own equilibrium. They will have to discover how toobtain what they want and to keep enough time and energy and emotional freedom for their inner search. They will becomewiser, more apt. And they will develop abilities which have been lying dormant in them.

But an individual who seeks to develop his life capacities must be sure to keep in his mind and in his feelings the reason forwhich he is doing this. He must not allow himself to be devoured by his efforts to improve his outer life. In this, he will also be

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better able to understand his fellow human beings, because he himself will always be feeling tempted by life, tempted to gofurther and further in that direction. And if he goes too far, life will swallow him up, because life is like that. Its alwayspressing us to give more to it.

In anything we do, we must never forget our aim, our central, essential value: to return again and again to this inner presencewhich opens us to a broader dimension.

We see from all we have said that this work has to do with living, an art of living with oneself, with opposite tendenciesthose

of our automatism and those which will open us to another dimension and create a harmony, a balance, and a betterfunctioning of the whole of our nature.

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This excerpt is taken from Material for Thought, The Present Life: A dialogue with Pauline de Dampierre, San Francisco,July 1986, pp. 4963, and is used here with their kind permission.