“I want to come from a place of abundance rather than negativity.”
This was the answer someone gave about why they weren’t drawn to the Gurdjieff work. The emphasis was on “Man cannot Do.” “Struggle with likes and dislikes.” “Man is asleep.” “Stand in front of your Lack.” In short—struggle, effort, intentional suffering, etc. Familiar tenants of the Work, these seem to emphasize negative attributes rather than empowering one to develop and share the positive.
Yet I don’t feel that way. The Work gives me many gifts and tools that help me navigate my life and my relationships. As a result, I am filled with a sense of abundance.
Limitless Potential
So, I was surprised by what Gavin Perry shared in his record of memories concerning his time at Sherborne with Mr. Bennett. He spoke during Claymont’s Course of study. This led me to read his entire written record. It included a memoriam from the first edition of The Enneagram in March of 1975, less than a year after John Bennett died. I was intrigued to come across this:
“Increasingly he [Bennett] emphasized the need for people to develop finer perceptions to enter into this action wherein a man can “do.” In conversations, he revealed his concern over the negative bias that had been given Gurdjieff’s ideas in the presentations current in the world: Man cannot do, he is a machine, he constantly deceives himself, and so on. All that was true, but it ignored Gurdjieff’s clear indications of ‘higher mind,’ of the almost limitless potential of human beings.”
Bennett’s “almost limitless potential of human beings” speaks directly to abundance. The more I work, the more I struggle using the tools of the Work, the more I gain. Bennett drove himself tirelessly following these very precepts and he was a living example of fulfilling human potential.
The Result of Efforts
True, effort and suffering are involved, but I often cause my own suffering. It’s by my own efforts employing real work that something transforms which is more than a simple cessation of suffering.
Abundance comes, but not because I am searching for it. I see it more as an accumulation of the results of my efforts. And the “results” may not feel like abundance at the time.
If I only work from largess, where is the fire that drives me from Remorse for what I am not?
As Bennett said elsewhere, “awakening a state of Remorse of Conscience is in itself a positive feeling and if properly evoked opens channels to the other [Unconditioned] world.”
Perhaps in the end, my biggest take-away from my experience on the Course at Sherborne were the moments in which I tasted the Unconditioned world. The world of possibilities, where anything was possible, including miracles. A world obtainable from struggle within myself and sometimes Grace from outside myself.
Now THAT is what I call Abundance.
I appreciate this topic. I feel it is hugely important and valuable. How strange it seems to me now that someone responds to “Man cannot ‘do'” that it is limiting and negative. So much the contrary, it is freeing, opening. With this understanding, I am free to relax into what I am and cease wasting energy attempting futilly to make happen what ‘i’ want, or trying to change myself, others or the world. Then, as you say, I begin to find that there is seemingly unlimited energy available to ‘do’ what is called for by the Cosmos. Then also, for myself, it all becomes joyful and celebratory, full of happiness.
James, thank you for weighing in on this. I love what you say here. And yes, it is all about the work of shifting from our little ‘i’s’ to building a real I, where abundance lives.