Stop analyzing

Hi there,

this is Lee van Laer, and you're listening to the podcast Idiots and Fools,

discussions about the Gurdjieff work, life, and everything else.

—Another solo podcast about the Gurdjieff work, life, and everything else.

Everything that takes place in terms of ideas and thought comes from the intellectual mind. It runs most of what goes on in terms of thinking. And yet, the intellectual mind is a machine that has a very clear purpose I don't really understand most of the time.

It's like a little toolbox filled with wrenches and screwdrivers. It isn't even really alive. And yet it does a terrific job of mimicking life and what it means. It does this innocently because it is its job to interpret and correlate and find analogies and associations, but that's not living. It's a toolbox. And most of the time I can just leave it alone and let it do its job by itself. It does not have to take center stage.

One of the difficulties I've noticed in the Gurdjieff work is almost everyone, even people that have been in groups for 40 and 50 and 60 years, tends to sit around constantly talking about the work and discussing ideas. They’re analyzing the work, not inhabiting being. And this habit of perpetual analysis in which the mind attempts to interpret every single thing that happens one way or the other through the lens of the Gurdjieff work is a terrible thing because life is not a process of analysis. Analysis can be a useful tool, but life is a process of living, of breathing in and out, of realigning the molecules in the body so that they all point in a single direction together and a clarity about things emerges. A clarity that is born from inhabiting the mind of the body and the way that it perceives which is completely different than the way the thinking part perceives.

Analysis will not serve me here. I need to enter a new relationship with my sensation.

A completely different sensation that has nothing to do with the way that the flesh feels about things.

A sensation that is connected to planetary and solar forces.

A much deeper sensation that arises from cosmological facts and not from analysis.

As long as I'm caught within the mind and thought and analysis, I'm divorced from what life is really all about and I'm blind to my planetary duties, which in the end are completely different than the duties I assign myself and the duties that other human beings assign me.

There are duties assigned by nature.

There are duties assigned by a relationship with other creatures and plants.

There are duties assigned by the moon and the sun, all of which I can begin to sense in the body if my molecules are correctly aligned.

And if you don't understand what I'm saying when I say that, then you need to penetrate into the magnetic properties of your sensation more deeply until you do, because the real understanding of life and the work is not analytical. It begins in the molecular sensation of being. And a real sensation of life and living cannot ever begin anywhere else, because the vibrations that exist at this point in the second being-body are lawful and there can't be any deviation from that if I wish to have more being within myself.

Thinking about too many ideas is what Mr. Gurdjieff would have called psychopathy. He uses the word quite frequently in his meetings. When people bring up ideas that are too analytical,

he warns them that if they go down that road, they will become psychopaths.

So I need, in a certain sense, to let go of the analysis, to stop thinking about all these ideas, perhaps to even stop thinking about the work and my wish, so that I can come to a much more profound stillness in my life. A stillness that is as permanent as my sensation; a stillness that does not follow me everywhere but leads me everywhere, a stillness that is the first thing present within me as I meet life and to which I constantly return, relying on it as the transparent interpretive mechanism of my being.

A stillness that doesn't analyze anything, but instead perceives it more deeply.

A sensation that does not analyze anything but assists me in the concentration of my molecular being so that I can perceive more deeply.

And if I stop analyzing everything, if I stop presuming that I can explain and interpret things, and I simply inhabit this mysterious place where nothing is actually known, If I align with my organic and molecular sensation more deeply, then the ground is prepared for feeling to arrive.

And I will never understand anything properly if sensation and feeling don't join together here at the root of my existence, because the highest and the deepest perceptions of my life arrive never through analysis, and always through feeling.