On 'Recoursing'

Wasted time is murder of sorts. You sense that in order to not commit this crime you must be able to ‘recourse.’ To recourse is to return to your highest purpose, to get in touch with the warmth and meaning of the endeavors of your circumstances. Such a movement, in order to be an effective tool, must be made available in a variety of habitats and moods. It must be utilized not just in moments of ease and deliberation, but also in moments of crisis, and in moments of near despair and pervasive dissatisfaction. More important still, this most-basic-vocabulary, this grounding project, will need to be sensed when distraction sets in or is about to occur – for movements of distraction and escape are far more prevalent than crisis in an environment of air conditioning, automobiles, Avon, and supermarkets.

So, the most-basic-vocabulary will need to be fleshed out, translated from experiential value to existential project. Trust in the project is essential. Deliberate projects, that is, goals that one makes a resolution to bring about do not often work. Sleep sets in. One forgets the ‘why’ of the project and so the effort to remain resolute loses its justification subjectively.

The problem of how to remain resolute has been with you for sometime – at least since you independently undertook to face your fears socially. Philosophically, you noticed Gurdjieff/Ouspensky and Krishnamurti to be talking about this problem: How to stay awake, they would say. Hyrum Smith in his book on Natural Laws of Success articulated many helpful things in this direction. Yet there is still the problem. There is still the submitting to sleep, the forgetting, the hopeless lost feeling of having no most-basic-vocabulary ‘at-hand’, for you often fall off, give in to pressures, to peers, you often indulge in entertainment and other releases, waking up out of their resultant hallucinations days later. As for meditation, you stopped looking at this direction because of its hurdle of boredom. Perhaps it is essential to get beyond this.

There is, though, the yearning for purity, for clean honesty, for a practice and a walking of the path at a stable speed.

If you blame a lot of this suffering from self-forgetting on environment, and you feel a lot of it is because of the ‘noise of thought’ of the familiar – from expectation and poor ways of living of family and community – then how do you live upright, stably, purely, in this environment until you move up to Arcata in January? How to prevent entanglement?

Discipline is necessary but not sufficient. For you will need to develop trust in the reason for the application of the discipline if you are not to develop resitance to it and so fall into entanglements. The search for Quiet will have to be subservient to the deliberate project. In the past Quiet was sought when it was not in play even if it was in conflict with what the high project necessitated. You have noticed the limitations of this. Quiet is essential. This is true. But it is not an end in itself. Or perhaps it is, perhaps the highest end is Quiet. You notice however, that such an end will not suit your circumstances, circumstances wherein action and decision are demanded. And so you will, for the moment, let the highest end shift and leave the evaluation of its meaning and assumptions for another time. This is where trust must come into play if ‘recourse’ will be a useful tool in times of distraction and crisis.

Gurdjieff, Longing, and Wondering Thoughts

You are pulled. You long for a complete devotion to the path. You think of reading the S.A. book. Maybe call Michael and resume talking things through.

You speak with your political science teacher, Scarfe, about testing, standardization, educative intentions, and the mood of community college. You like her one on one. You kind of get into this really slow, deliberate façade with her.

You worry about things. Presentations in the weeks to come worry you. You feel also like you don’t have time for what’s meaningful – and for doing things right. You wish you could connect with someone. This girl in your Bio class reminds you of the main character in the French movie “Water Lilies”. You watch the rest of the film on netflix.

Maybe you’ll ride Steve’s bike. Save some money. Have it handy for path things. Maybe you’ll talk to Michael about trajectories. Maybe finish stats in summer and just ‘take off’. You’ve been yearning. Go away to school only when you think paying money to do so is worthy. You don’t want to get stuck owing money for a fucking loan. Stuck, etc.

A Gurdjieff quote recalls a lot of stuff about ‘right movement’:

“I wished to create around myself conditions in which a man would be continually reminded of the sense and aim of his existence by an unavoidable friction between his conscience and the automatic manifestations of his nature.” —G.I. Gurdjieff, ca. 1913

This reminds you of the way out. Eckhart Tolle in a park.

You are angry that school doesn’t provide instruction in self-knowledge. It can then only be an authoritative exercise. This is the bulk of the argument you have against ‘education’.