I hardly ever pay attention to how you work. It’s always about how I work, how am I getting on? I mean, in the inner-work sense. The “work on yourself” sense.
When I think of others and their process, it tends to be in relation to my own. Does it look like how I’m doing it? And if it doesn’t, is it truly The Work?
I don’t like to admit this, but there is that sense of competition— how do your efforts stack up to mine in terms of (you name it): consciousness? Being? Stage of development? Status? What am I in relation to you? Am I the teacher or the student? Are we peers?
For instance, if the way you do an exercise, either an inner exercise or one of the movements and it’s different than how I do it, which is correct?
Same for the Ideas that we study from Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Bennett; all those who came before us. The Enneagram, the Law of Three, the Law of Seven, the Ray of Creation, the Food Diagram, Energies, Sensing. Work with Emotions, Negativity, Identification, Likes and Dislikes. How you approach these ideas may be very different than how I do.
DOES IT REALLY MATTER?
Your Work/My Work
There’s also the passing on of things: ideas, concepts, experiences (like sensation), exercises, practices, vocabulary. This is knowledge, it begs to be shared. But then, there’s the attaining of understanding, which can only happen individually, with experience.
With understanding, comes a shared recognition. It doesn’t need to be in words. Your experience resonates with my experience. Better yet we share an experience. We’re both following the same trajectory, tramping the same terrain. Searching in the same direction.
The farther along I go in this life of search, the more obvious it becomes that how you work is not going to be how I work. I used to think everyone experienced things the way I did. My inner map matched theirs and if it didn’t, either theirs or mine was “wrong.”
But now I see that we can take different routes and end up in the same place. Does it really matter how you got there? Why not appreciate the meet-up? And take interest in the differences that got us there? Your insight may help me see something I’ve missed along the way. Maybe even help me grow some more.
For a long time I tried to imitate the ways of others in the work, having no confidence in my our ways. But as your blog points our “your ways are not my ways.” I have come to trust my ways, realizing ways, done with intention are real.
Exactly!
This reminds me of the Sufi story from Idries Shah that I’ve always enjoyed. I tried putting a link in the comments, but it seem WordPress doesn’t like that idea, so here is the full story from an Idries Shah Tumblr site:
The Man Who Walked on Water
A conventionally-minded dervish, from an austerely pious school, was walking one day along a river bank. He was absorbed in concentration upon moralistic and scholastic problems, for this was the form which Sufi teaching had taken in the community to which he belonged. He equated emotional religion with the search for ultimate Truth.
Suddenly his thoughts were interrupted by a loud shout: someone was repeating the dervish call. ‘There is no point in that,’ he said to himself, ‘because the man is mispronouncing the syllables. Instead of intoning ya hu, he is saying u ya hu.’
Then he realized that he had a duty, as a more careful student, to correct this unfortunate person, who might have had no opportunity of being rightly guided, and was therefore probably only doing his best to attune himself with the idea behind the sounds.
So he hired a boat and made his way to the island in midstream from which the sound appeared to come.
Sitting in a reed hut he found a man, dressed in a dervish robe, moving in time to his own repetition of the initiatory phrase. ‘My friend,’ said the first dervish, ‘you are mispronouncing the phrase. It is incumbent upon me to tell you this, because there is merit for him who gives and him who takes advice. This is the way in which you speak it.’ And he told him.
‘Thank you,’ said the other dervish humbly.
The first dervish entered his boat again, full of satisfaction at having done a good deed. After all, it was said that a man who could repeat the sacred formula correctly could even walk upon the waves: something that he had never seen, but always hoped — for some reason — to be able to achieve.
Now he could hear nothing from the reed hut, but he was sure that his lesson had been well taken.
Then he heard a faltering u ya as the second dervish started to repeat the phrase in his old way…
While the first dervish was thinking about this, reflecting upon the perversity of humanity and its persistence in error, he suddenly saw a strange sight. From the island the other dervish was coming towards him, walking on the surface of the water…
Amazed, he stopped rowing. The second dervish walked up to him and said: ‘Brother, I am sorry to trouble you, but I have to come out to ask you again the standard method of making the repetition you were telling me, because I find it difficult to remember it.’
Thank you so much for taking the time to relay this wonderful Sufi story. As it turns out, it is quite timely!