one of the things I've struggled with for 15 years now is the idea of free will.
There's a "law" in behavioral psychology called the Melioration Principle. It says that an organism will engage in a behavior until a competing behavior offers a better reward. You can see this every day, in everything you do. When you make a choice, what you're doing is really just a quantitative weighing of rewards. And doesn't that sound mechanical? Does that seem like free will? It seems like free will is just solving this calculus equation.
Gurdjieff says there's a way out of this. That there are moments when you can escape this inner slavery. Moments when your actions aren't mechanically dictated by external circumstances. With work, with awareness of the internal world, with "conscious labor and intentional suffering", we can achieve brief moments of internal freedom.
And I say: I will believe it when I see it.
But I'm not dismissing it until I have walked down the path myself. If this kind of freedom is possible, I want to taste it.
I believe it now. It's possible to have a moment of genuine free will.
It's only possible when you've brought about
a contact between your conscious and unconscious parts.
Eventually, the limb-sensing exercise becomes a map to that place. In this place, in the inner circle of self, you can become momentarily free of the mechanical influences of the material world (behavioral conditioning ... stimulus & response).
Once you are outside of the ego, your actions can originate from something else.
(a voice in the distance whispers the word "reality"
another voice goes "shhhhhh")
Joseph Campbell talks about
Holiness as the thing which bridges the higher and lower worlds, it is the neutral force between up and down.
The Holy Grail, to me, is the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm. The laws of the inner world and the laws of the universe are the same.
The universe is the big jazz chaos, the AUM mantra. We're just one of the sounds inside of it. But if you sit for long enough, you lose the sense of that sound, you hear the whole composition. Being able to act on behalf of that composition, rather than the instrument in your hands, is
holy.
Years ago, I had this epiphany when I noticed the dust behind my computer monitor. It occured to me that I look at this dust all the time, every day, and I never clean it! because I don't actually notice it.
How do we notice these things which are around us all the time, but are occluded by our daily rhythms and the way we choose to distribute our attention?
You need a Shock. I thought, once, that I could build these Shocks into my daily life as a routine. Every other Wednesday, I'd take 2 hours to do something
different. And that novelty would allow me to return to the rhythm with fresh eyes, finally sensing the dust behind the monitor -- and also the unnoticed dust behind everything in my life.
This is why the Bible says you must remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. It means you need a break from your life, to go away and return. Because only then can you overcome the ego which drives everyday life and act in service to the higher world - this bigger picture is invisible unless you can step
outside of the everyday rhythm and see it for what it is. The Old Testament also tells farmers they should let 1/7th of their fields lay fallow every season. This allows the soil time to regenerate, ensures the long term life of the farm. All things must rest
so that they may again awaken.
Madame de Salzmann says that ordering your life so as to create the conditions for this awareness is
sacred. In the Gurdjieff work, we don't casually throw around words like Holy and Sacred, they have so much baggage... But now I understand what it means.
If you exercise every day, you may observe incremental change. But every so often, you can look back and notice how far you've come since the beginning. Right now I'm noticing how far I've come since I started this Work. And I've realized that I was doing the Work before I learned about Gurdjieff. (my Fractal Cult art project / cabal was part of it too.) A moment of ego death is holy. I can now recognize that I may have had a few flickering moments of free will during my life. And I am preparing myself to have one intentionally. To experience free will, consciously, is like being born again.
Gurdjieff observed as a child that Yazidis were unable to step out of a circle traced around them on the ground. We are all like this, the circle is ego, behavioral conditioning, association, stimulus & response, culture, dogma, good and evil---the circle is the womb.
