“all of my enterprises will fail” (Stephen Jenkinson)

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Sometimes you hear something that shakes you in a way that won’t be unshaken, or at least that’s the way you hope it’ll be; that the cracks will ache enough to remind you the ground’s not as solid as you pretend it is. This piece from Stephen Jenkinson is one of those times.

“People say to me all the time, ‘How do you keep going? What’s the point? How do you ask yourself to keep going, when the futility is so palpable?’ And I say to them, ‘hey, the last part of what you said is the answer to your question.’

I know all of my enterprises will fail. I know that already. I’m not doing this, any of these things, holding out hope that somehow anything’s going to change as a result of doing them. All I’m trying to do, is, participate in some small way, in the small collection of memories that will accompany my death. That’s all I’m trying to do. Is have a small part to play in whatever those memories might be. Understanding now that the way I’m proceeding is helping to author those things that people will remember, if they’re inclined to. But there’s not much more to it than that. But, that is not a recipe for futility, that is what I’m trying to to say. One of the things I learned at the deathbed is, that’s the whole thing. That’s the magic of it, is that our willingness to remember turns out to be a kind of banquet, that we don’t know how to invite anybody to, and we’re not sure how to cater for it. But the remembering is the food.”

—Stephen Jenkinson, in an interview with Ken Rose

Stephen Jenkinson: The innate skill of obedience

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“Every natural thing in this world has the innate skill of obedience. With the North American history of slavery in plain view, and with every weekend Buddhist looking to kill every Buddha they meet on the road, obedience generally goes against the North American grain. As adults, we are not big on obeying. The quality of being obedient is not much sought or taught, except to small children while they are small. Etymologically, obedience has nothing to do with being some kind of slave. It means instead a willingness and an ability to listen to what is, to attend to it. Obedience is a following the grain of things. With that skill of obedience, every natural thing knows above all how to be itself, come what may. Dying is a natural thing, and left to its natural self each living thing knows how to die. The body has the genius of a natural thing, and it knows how to obey the accumulation of time, wear and tear, disease and symptoms. It knows how to stop. But med-tech, not in any sense a natural thing, knows how to subvert the way disease and symptoms have of keeping and marking time, and in doing so it subverts the body’s knowledge of how to stop.”

—Stephen Jenkinson, “Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul”, North Atlantic Books, 2015, page 51.

Ecstasies and spontaneities of the street show: on the road in France

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Mint tea and chocolate

The caravan started with a conversation over mint tea and chocolate in the salon-library-bazaar-book-store-tea-space of an old French farmhouse turned into an ashram.

For four days, a dozen of us in our twenties had been coming face-to-face with the depths and chaos of our humanness, our creativity, our shadows, and our souls, through workshops on writing, drawing, chanting and moving, with meals together, meditation in the morning, and music and poetry throughout. Intense, difficult, uncomfortable — life-affirming.

It was after midnight on the last night, and handful of us remained awake, building dreams.

The central idea: a traveling caravan, where we could live what we love while offering it to the world — playing music, reading poetry, performing theatre, dancing, selling books, cooking, sharing skills and knowledge, drinking tea and eating chocolate.

Create, create, commit

One of the speakers for the seminar, M., had shared with us the instruction her spiritual teacher gave her:

“Create, create, create! Show, show, show!”

Which is what she was doing: painting, writing, traveling, and continuously finding new ways to share what she was creating.

We were all engaging various degrees of creative work, but (at least for me) it was easier to “just create,” without the demand and friction of needing to show my work. Easier to stay hidden and stay comfortable.

As we talked, M. was working in the office next to us, listening. Then she stepped into the room with a question: what were we actually going to do? What concrete steps were we willing to take? Tonight, before we all left and the energy dissipated?

In our ecstatic dream building, visions walked before reality, and our own feet were barely on the ground. If someone had suggested we learn to fly, we would have believed it possible (and maybe it would have been). The energy and excitement had been building through hours of talking and chocolate. We could have left that space high on ideas, laid in our beds too excited to sleep.

Then we’d wake up the next morning and go back to our lives. The dream might still dwell in our minds, but the energy we’d collected would dissipate. It would go elsewhere, feed other projects. The dream would remain a dream, like most do.

So: what were we willing to do, that night, to bring our magnificent ideas down from the sky, to the earth, where we could get a foothold? (A woman sitting with us, an experienced and successful painter, sculptor and artist, joked, “After this, you can go outside and stare at the stars, just to come down a little bit.”)

On scraps of paper, we each wrote a sentence describing our dream project together. The vision was there, defined. The passion was there. But to become a project, not just an idea, it needed clear, physical, committed sustenance — that is, action.

So we decided to get together for a weekend and start creating. Play music, read poetry, perform theatre; cook, eat, talk, meditate, drink tea and break chocolate together. Enshrine time and space — three days, one house — fill it with six individuals with shared intention — and see what would happen. The vision of the caravan, in a house. I would be in France for another month and a half before returning to the United States. We narrowed it down to one weekend and agreed: “I’ll be there.”
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J.G. Bennett: The life of Creativity

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J.G. Bennett, on what has been called the Gurdjieff work, and Bennett describes as being concerned with the transformation of substances in various forms:

“The notion of the Fourth Way is wholly bound up with these two principles; the first is that of complete involvement in life externally, and secondly, in the acceptance internally of responsibility for certain work that is required for a great Cosmic Purpose.

According to Gurdjieff, this purpose is concerned with the transformation of substances whereby the destiny of mankind as a whole can be kept moving in the right way. This takes many forms. It can take the form of activities of artistic creation; it can take the form of certain kinds of social organizations; it can take the forms of the transmission of specialized forms of knowledge, or research into the conditions of mankind, and preparation for the future, and certain other tasks, more specifically connected with what I said; that is, the transformation of substances.

I am personally confident, from long years of study of this matter and having been in contact with a rather unusually large number of people who have been concerned in this particular field, that there really is such Work and that there are people who understand it in a way that is not obviously visible on the surface. This means that there is in effect a Twofold Life on the earth. One is the visible, external life in which we all have to participate, and the other is an invisible life in which we can participate if we choose. In a sense one can say the first life is a causal life; that is to say, in that life causes that exist in the past produce results that are being experienced in the present and which will be carried forward in the future. It can also be called the stream of happenings. It is of course called by such names of Samsara and the Wheel of Life, and so on, but in a very simple way it is the ordinary life that we all live. The second, the other life, is non-causual, which means that it exists only in so far as it is created. It is the life of Creativity. Every creative act rightly performed is a means of participation in that life. And the search for creation is the search for that life.

Creation is infinitely varied in its content and its forms. Everything that is going on everywhere is also a field of possible creativity, and therefore there is no limit to what can be found in the field of creation. But the great majority of mankind are content to live in the first life. A few are searching for the other, because there is a feeling of a need to participate in creative activity and a realization that one is only half alive, and perhaps not even that, if one is not participating.

That is what is meant by the word Work, and when we talk about ‘the work’ or the Great Work — Magnum Opus — it refers to the invisible world which has to be perpetually created in order that it should be. And it is that that we are called to if we are destined for accelerated completion. In order to enter that world, we have to earn the right to be in it, and for that we have to bring to it something made by ourselves. The first and simplest thing we can bring is our own capacity for work; our own capacity for transforming energy, and therefore for participating in the Creation. This can afterwords be converted into specific forms of creativity, according to objective needs and our own subjective powers.

There is no doubt that the Fourth Way is the direct application of the principle of creativity in life. That is why I called it non-causal. It always has to start without an antecedent cause. It is a spontaneous call from beyond that makes this possible.”

(From a lecture at Denison House in the summer of 1963, published in 1973 in “Gurdjieff: A Very Great Enigma”)

I Am a Machine

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I am a machine. I do not act from careful consideration, I act from conditioning. I am run the way society has taught me to run. I am run by my habits. I am run by an underlying sentience which has learned to imitate, to fit in, to wear many faces, but has not yet become self-aware.

I am a machine that feeds on many inputs: my childhood, my environment, the society I live in, my education, the interactions I have every day. I feed on many sources, but produce one primary output: waste. I am a waste machine.

I gobble up everything around me — food, mood, products, information, experience — and shit it out. I leave behind a trail of waste: wasted words, wasted time, wasted energy.

I leave behind a trail of trash: plastic wrappers, grocery bags, styrofoam takeout containers, coffee cups, water bottles, band-aids, paper towels, floss, jars, bottles, rotting fruit, wilted vegetables, stale bread, countless boxes, packages and containers.

Even more liberally than I use the world around me, I waste energy. I waste energy with frustration over trivialities — whether I was invited, whether I should do it today or tomorrow, that the cups were put back in the wrong cupboard, that I’m out of clean socks.

I waste time and energy working for someone else’s profit, for a wage I waste on beer, tea, and organic corporate tomatoes.

I waste energy with lust, eyes finding incarnate fantasies in too many bodies. I lust for a life I could be living and forget to live the life that I am alive in.

I waste thoughts, filing intellect into useless bins: opinion, judgment, interpretation, complaint, dissatisfaction.

I expel emotions and energy carelessly and thoughtlessly, like a loudspeaker with no one at the controls, mic passed around aimlessly. Whatever is shouted into the mic, I shout back louder.

I am a machine calibrated for efficiency and immediacy, and waste is the quickest, easiest response. So it has become my default reaction, even to the pettiest concerns.

I am one input in a civilization built on waste. My mechanicalness is incorporated into the mechanism of civilization; my waste is absorbed into the waste network.

Drains take my defecation and urine and liquid food and dirt and phlegm, so I don’t have to see them, think about them or deal with them. Trash cans on every street corner, in every restaurant, and in every house take anything I throw into them. I acknowledge my waste for a moment and then it’s gone and I’m already processing something new for disposal.

A system of screens, billboards, signs, stores, headlines, posters, voices, images, and structures funnel my time and attention, telling me where to look and what to think. My time and attention is processed as waste material. Endless inputs, branded as information, entertainment, guidance, wisdom, news, think for me, or distract me from needing to think at all. I am calibrated to allow these inputs to turn my awareness off and let the machine work, taking in life and producing waste.

As a waste machine, I am a reliable source of income for the industries of modern civilization, which are efficiently arranged to run off the time, attention, labor, money and resources I mechanically spend.

My waste is a necessary resource for the waste cycle of civilization. As a productive waste machine, I am a productive member of society.

Desert lessons

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The desert does not fear death. The desert mouse fears the hawk, the desert deer fears the human, the human fears itself. But the desert is not afraid. It is beyond fear, larger than every life in it; and at the same time, the desert is every life in it.

The desert is not separate from lives filled with fear, and hunger, and contemplation. It holds these, and every step and screech, every birth and death, every flight and stand, every shift and growth; it holds them but it is not held by them. It is not trapped by them.

In the desert, death is natural. A carcass drying in the sun, a prickly pear cactus decaying into the ground, an insect serving a snack to a bird. There is no shame, no judgment, no restraint, nothing but what is.

What is natural in me is co-opted by discontent, desire, doubt, uncertainty. And this, too, is natural. But unlike the prickly pear, or the prey, living shoulder to shoulder with death, I push away anything I don’t want to face. Sensations and feelings arise and I step aside, half here and half somewhere else, watching uncomfortably.

But what I feel needs me in order to be felt, like the desert soil needs the prickly pear’s dry husks, like the hawk needs the mouse. If I’m unwilling, what I need to feel doesn’t go away, it slumps between life and death, not lived and not let go either.

As nature ourselves, why is it so hard to live naturally? Why do we serve ego over essence, building layers and barriers between our minds, our bodies and what is? Why do I fight against the process that is my life, that is life — the process that I have no choice about inhabiting, from the moment I’m conceived to the moment I die?

How much easier it would be to surrender to what is, as nature calls so softly, and sometimes harshly, for me to do. As God calls so tenderly, and sometimes forcefully, for me to do.