You are concerned, for starters, because you are disorderly. You feel entrapped by the environment. You feel contrasting pulls. You sense that you often do not maintain control over your movements. You are confused about what project to go with, to engage in, to trust. You get the impression that you are not true to yourself, that you are not in-touch with yourself. Distractions seem to lull you into a queer sleep, a sleep that you awaken from lost and anxious sometimes hours later. Some of your projects, you feel, have no business being yours: you notice that persons in your small subculture do the same sort of thing and you feel both doubtful and comfortable in regard to its system. There appears to be a mixture of truth and falsehood in the expected-path, yet you are often not centered or vital enough to sift it out. The result is ‘abrupt complexity’, you are not sure what to do with yourself or you go about doing what’s expected in a resigned manner – you suddenly feel foreign. When you encounter this ‘abrupt complexity’ you lose your in-touchness with self. Self is a whispered trajectory. Self is to be cared for because ‘abrupt complexity’, the force that fosters reactivity and mechanicalness, such is in the air, has seeped into the life-force of the public-narrative. You indulge in reactive fostering activities, yet setting limits and goals seems to prevent spontaneity.
So, it is taken as a starting assumption – and we must begin even if we begin on uneven soil – that in order to care for self that we are able to notice what self is and what it is not, that we must do this if we are to sort through the ‘abrupt complexity’ of the public distinction pointer and the public suppose-to-do-with-one’s-life-narrative, and if we are to notice when indulgences lull us to sleep consuming our vitality and in-touchness of self.
Self-inquiry, then, begins with a notation of diffusion, and from this awareness of diffusion sprouts a seeking to find a way out. Gurdjieff’s metaphor is helpful: Man is asleep, that is, in prison. Man must realize first and foremost that he is in this sleep-prison. From this urgency, he will attend to possible escape routes, perhaps attuning to the personality of the guards, the rituals of the prison as a whole and so on. But the walls are thick and high, the guards are unforgiving. How could he possibly escape? His direct sense of hopelessness is felt by the other prisoners; those that have sensed what he has sensed gravitate to him (or he gravitates to them). They form a group of sorts and in their mutual aim they do what one could not, they experiment with digging tunnels, checking weak areas in the walls, and acquiring various goods that may help them. In this process, they may receive word from those that have escaped already, that is, from those on the outside. Not everyone may escape, but with such works in motion, the possibility of a few locating the path out becomes feasible.
Does one need help from the outside or may one develop in-touchness with self by oneself?
You have assumed that to cultivate in-touchness with self and to care for self that you are to practice slowing down and stilling. In practicing thus, you can cut out the noise and possessive qualities of ‘abrupt confusion’: you can stop the car and get off the Expectational-living highway. Practicing stillness is to unchain yourself and walk out of the illusiveness of the cave, drawing fresh air from the sunlight. It stops the spinning, sends warm blood through the veins, and cuts the shit. Meditation, jogging, various journaling methods, these are self-centering activities.
But lately it occurs to you that something more is needed. The public-social-vocabulary has dealt much ‘abrupt confusion’. Perhaps a morality is needed in order to be able to remain awake. This will consist of actions that one is to recourse to when reactivity is noticed, when we wake up out of our dream and see that we are lying on a slim cot in a cold cell. The source-value is in understanding self and fostering right-action, that is, movement in which one is not mechanical but in active engaged care. It is assumed that active engaged care is a prerequisite for flourishing, that if one cannot will what they are doing they cannot flourish. To will is to be able and willing to get behind what on is doing. It is akin to the gage of eternal recurrence: to get behind the action, not holding anything back. It is thought that if such will is present that ‘abrupt confusion’ and the variety of reactivity will have no effect. Problems arising from diffusion will not take root.
The reclusion of a seeker is always sought in order to eradicate the problems of diffusion. Diffusion may be defined as out of touchness with self; it is a circumstance in which one does not really know why one is doing what one is doing in leading their lives. There is no purposive care or trust. For instance, from diffusion other people are viewed as either vastly superior (in control) or automatons (weak sheep). Either way, the whole tumbling, whirring movement of society, the ‘government’, the game, is observed as destructive and untrustworthy. Diffused man is suspicious. He thinks in extremes and in escape routes. Often he’s a pessimist and an outsider; occasionally he resorts to the drug of romanticism, bohemianism, crime, and even to actual drugs. (Colin Wilson has written about the possibility that the criminal is seeking release from entrapment, and by say murdering or robbing that he glimpses the freedom sought, a world without the suppose-toes, pressures, expectations.) It can be seen, though, that the movements of all of these ‘types’ - the pessimist, the addict, and so on- are mechanical. Even the first steps of the seeker are so. But, again, there is always a starting point. Whoever has located the way has at some point been lost in the darkness of the forest. One notices that one does not know why one is doing what one is doing, is merely doing what is expected, and feels as if they do not have control. He may then feel betrayed by his parents. He may then desire to drown his troubles away. He may fantasize about utopias or good circumstances. He may distract away this impression by holding to the socially appropriate narrative tighter still. He may lash out at the ‘system’. He may actually lash out, rape, kill. He may blame himself and release the tension through psychological illness. He may and so on…
Cycles of imprisonment possess ‘thought’ and demand compulsive movement. We would do well to be in-touch with the cause of our search, to keep it ‘at-hand’ and near. For when we are asleep, possessed by thought, there cannot be care. And in not caring, we find that our circumstances or other people are deciding our movements. Naturally, then, there is the sense of diffusion, and when something or someone else controls our lives, we are neither happy nor productive - we do not experience inner piece.
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