Go forth in joy

My wife Neal and Sylvia, Louise March’s daughter, Nov. 5 2024, at the polls in Orangetown, NY. Sylvia, for those of you who don’t know this, is one of the very few people still alive who knew Mr. Gurdjieff personally as a child.

He may be gone— yet the spirit of Mr. Gurdjieff’s work is very much alive within Being—and it is inherently joyful!

Transcript:

Another solo episode of Idiots and Fools.
We often, in our life and in our spiritual work, somehow hesitate to go forth and take action on something because we're unsure of ourselves.

We don't know enough.

We haven't figured things out.

We're hesitant.

We're afraid.

And I think this is the normal condition for human beings, because no matter how much we think we know and how smart we think we are, only the idiot and the fool think that they know everything and can go forward in full confidence that what they are doing is right.

There is, in other words, always a question in front of me as to whether I am aware enough of the situation I'm in to take action that will benefit me and other people.

I do my best. We all do our best. And yet, especially in spiritual work, when we try to develop these important—or so we say they are— qualities of attention, which is needed to go forth, and intention, which gives us reasons to go forth, into life, as we attempt to develop these things, do we ever consider what their real purpose is, what their use is, both in being and in life?

For the two aren't really separated. Being and life are in fact one thing.
They're not joined at the hip. They’re joined in the cosmos from the top to the bottom.

Every part of each body of being and each body of life is connected to one another. so that although we can discuss being-bodies, we can also discuss being-life. Being-life is a whole thing.

In examining the role of attention and intention in being life, which is the combination of the inner and the outer life, the whole world, in other words, not just one half of it.

When we examine the role of these faculties, perhaps if we become still enough and touch things deeper in ourselves than our thought alone, we can begin to see that attention and intention are tools here to help us go forth into life.

To first be, and then do.

Gurdjieff, after all, did say that if a man developed his inner faculty sufficiently, he could do. If you, like me, are an older person relatively late in life, one needs to come to the question am I able to do? At the age of 69 I can't wait much longer if I want to ”do” anything, and I think that on the whole, despite my doubt and uncertainty as to how to go forth into life, I have learned a little bit about what it means to do.

And, interestingly enough, the first part of doing is to go forth into life, because that is the only place that any doing can happen.

Yet, as I said to a younger person yesterday on a bus headed into New York City on a
rainy morning, we cannot just go forth to do. But coming from the heart of our work and our being life, we need to go forth most urgently with joy towards life and to do everything we can with joy.

This work, after all, is about joy.

It is an embodiment of the joy of being and the joy of life.

And at its heart is not some depressed philosophy that says we cannot do and we are not this and we are not that.

No.

This work, this Gurdjieff work, as we call it, isn't the Gurdjieff work at all.
This work belongs to life. And this work has at its heart, not a philosophy, but an action of joy.

We can embody that joy and bring it into life with goodness in our being. That is what this work of life has as its intention. 
It's a strange thing, joy, because it's always mixed with sorrow in exactly equal proportion and I do not pretend to understand that mystery. But if your work is real and it becomes a living thing, it penetrates you to the marrow of your bones in such a way that joy is awakened from its long slumber throughout a lifetime and emerges suddenly as though the day had just begun, bringing light to everything.

Bringing light from within and helping that light to move without from the inner into the outer.

A joy that begins at the root of the soul and moves into life through the vehicle that we call being.

It's enough already with the doubt and the self-remembering and the questions and the uncertainty. We can become identified with that just as easily as anything else. We need to become free from within and free in the outer sense of the word only in order to bring joy forth into life on behalf of others, not for myself.

I can't wait forever to undertake this work, because if I do, I may die, having done nothing whatsoever. And at a certain point, the questions must end, and life must begin to be lived fully within joy and without hesitation.

So I said to this young woman, go forth in joy and do everything you do in life from the heart of a joyfulness that you bring from within your presence to each person you meet, no matter who they are.

It's a strange thing, joy. It is a wondrous thing. And I think that we need to begin right now, even now, to embody it in each small thought and deed and action, in each moment of attention,
and in each intention we form.

We need to remain, through our cosmological sensation, in touch with this great joy at the root of the cosmos.

It is not just a calling or a duty. It is an invitation to participate in one of the fundamental properties of love, which is right here on the threshold, knocking on the door and asking to come in.

I should not refuse when I hear that sound. It is a simple enough thing, in the end, to open the door and to greet love like the old friend it is, and say:

Yes.