Manifesto of the Lifestyle Experimenters

After the given materials of life begin to look themselves rather given and circumstantial, a search ensues: a search for fertile grounds, for a way of life that does not hang itself on the merely local, the merely familiar. With eyes toward this search, our hungry gaze looks out over its own history and it's species history. We earnestly sift through personal traumas and gifts, and scavenge the fruits of the intellectual generations. Here, some of us halt in our tracks, solemn, energized by the breadth of the systematic puzzles or the empirical beauties and tragedies of nature. Vitalized, they'll tell stories which back up their settlement: everything points to the solution of this problem, they say; everything follows laws which can be understood if only we would apply the correctly balanced efforts. For instance, one such settler would appraise themselves thus, "I'm lacking in assertion and my life has become a slavery because of this - and so the way out is to cultivate the powers of self-esteem." Or another would appraise that,  "The world would evolve with the advancement of education, with the eradication of this or that social hang-up." With this, a "battleground" has been facilitated. The search has revealed the fertile grounds we sought, has gone beyond the merely local and fertile.
A great majority at least nod at this approach - in fact, I would wager that all do, at minimum, nod at it. Nevertheless, a minority is not ultimately persuaded. They feel that the "battleground" is just another version of the given, the familiar, the circumstantial. Their suspicion is that the values by which the "battlegrounders" gravitate only goes skin deep: the world does not provide them, only human beings do, and only human beings within circumstantial ruts. From our minorities eyes, all values are experiments in lifestyle, can only be experiments in lifestyle. Building a life on a battle ground is fine, but the added qualification that it is the ground is, for this minority, a kind of shortsightedness or immaturity. They say to the premature settlers: "Look, you have forgotten that always and everywhere we humans are winging-it. We are organic, doing what we do with whatsoever equipment we have access to. Your problems are happenstance, your methods happenstance, and your vision happenstance. There are no ultimate, cosmos signifying obligations that demand to be responsibly met. The world issues no clues which are not first inferred and interpreted by us dying animals. Whatever values you participate in are values you have made up, or else they are values you have followed from the example or compulsion of others. Everything undertaken, however, is guesswork; in guesswork lies all the human possibilities. The approach of you, the battlegrounders, to wholeheartedly get behind some problem you deem central, then, is a strategy, particularly a strategy of coping with life. All there is can be summed up thus, unaccountable weirdness and unaccountable longing. Our movements, which follow, can only be experimental attempts to deal with the unaccountable."  

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’.