Conscious Effort and Intentional Suffering
Anyone who has studied the writings of Gurdjieff knows these terms. But what do they mean?
Gurdjieff considered them the basis of “The Work.” He called them together: “Being Partkdolg Duty.” From the roots of the word “partkdolg,” * this means “being duty-duty-duty.” Duty to the third power.
Why being duty? Do we owe something for being here? Not “Original Sin,” but original debt, if you like. As human beings, we possess the most highly evolved machine/apparatus/chemical factory existing (as far as we know.) Perhaps this implies a duty to develop more this gift in order to “pay the debt of our arising.”
Many people take this word “suffering” as morality – Christian morality or similar. “Suffering enobles.” The Work has no morality any more than, say, the techniques of carpentry have. If your techniques result in a good chair or table, then use them. Suffering in older English meant “allow.” “Suffer the little children to come unto me.”
Understand how Gurdjieff worked. He wanted people to think for themselves, not just to take what he said as “The Truth.” So he would have someone read his writings before a group. If they seemed to grasp the concepts easily, he would re-write to make it more difficult. “Bury the dog deeper.” He disguised his meaning in non-obvious ways, and a term might have several meanings in different contexts.
So “conscious effort” (also called “conscious labor”) may not mean an effort made consciously, but rather effort, or labor, involving consciousness. Work with consciousness, strengthening consciousness. Intentional suffering similarly may not mean suffering intentionally, but suffering related to intention.
He titled his last book: Life is Real Only Then, When I Am. Note that it does NOT say “Life is Real Only When I Am” – i.e. when I am real, but when I Am. “Am” = first person of verb “to be,” so when there is an I. He says in other places that most people do not have an I.
He describes in this book how he gave a page of writing to his translator who translated a phrase as “voluntary suffering.” He then discriminated between voluntary and intentional suffering, but he doesn’t explain this in the book. He does stress the importance of the difference.
So clearly the term does not mean suffering undertaken voluntarily or willfully, like those extreme Christians who flog themselves or carry heavy crosses through the streets.
He writes a lot about how he sets intentions and sees them through. So “intentional suffering” may mean that you set an intention and carry it through, and suffer (bear, carry) the consequences. Setting an intention which involves other people entails a kind of suffering which he calls bearing the negative manifestations of others – a part of intentional suffering.
So working on oneself, individual evolution, requires carrying out real projects in the great world, with others, not just sitting in a cave and meditating.
The other part of being partkdolg duty, effort (or labor) of consciousness, means striving to be in the highest state of consciousness one can, while carrying out these intentions.
So this “being partkdolg duty” looks a lot like karma yoga, or being “in the world but not of it,” as the Sufis put it. Work with others on real life projects without attachment or identification, without motivation by rewards or criticism, while at the same time striving to raise one’s consciousness.
One must have the intention and strive to carry it out, and this process transforms one’s being and develops the will. One takes part in the universal evolution. The “Endlessness” created such beings to help manage the expanding Cosmos.
These two ways of working go hand in hand. Lots of people work on real life projects but they identify with the process and results. Some work on raising their consciousness without engaging with life.
Sitting meditation – what some call “the Attention Laboratory” – without applying the results during day-to-day living, can even result in what Gurdjieff would call “candidates for the mental asylum.”
If you have no intention, then nothing matters. You drift around like a leaf in the wind. On the other hand, if you have intention, then you suffer. You suffer because the situation inevitably changes during the process, and because other people may disrupt your intentions. Therefore you need to master what Gurdjieff called “The Law of Seven,” which deals with completion of processes through changing time.
Ouspensky and Bennett
In the first few chapters of In Search of the Miraculous, Ouspensky’s problem surfaces. He always wanted to reduce Gurdjieff’s ideas to a system, to make something absolute out of them.
Originally he saw Gurdjieff’s talks as fragmented, but after a while he began to see that they formed one whole. His own mind created this illusion.
The Work manifests like life: messy, incomplete, inconsistent, a never ending process. In trying to abstract it, dry it out, make it into something definite that you can pin down, you kill it. You might present a showy collection of dead butterflies, but you won’t understand the living ecosystem. You cannot separate the Work from the specific situation, the interaction between Master and students, the given tasks, the connection to history.
Ouspensky never understood that there is no “Way,” apart from the Way each aspirant creates as he understands.
That’s probably why Ouspensky rejected Gurdjieff. To the end of his life, he never gave up waiting for the Masters from the East to come and show him the Way. “We have an incomplete system,” he told his students. Precisely!
Other groups who followed Gurdjieff also claim to promulgate “the Gurdjieff System,” which probably makes him laugh his head off in his grave. If there were such a “System,” we could set up “Work Universities,” and hand out enlightenment instead of diplomas. Sorry to disappoint you kids – even the great Gautama Buddha made it clear. Tradition gives his dying words as: “Work out your own liberation with diligence.” As in a live theater performance or a “happening,” you just have to be there. If you missed it, you missed it.
John G. Bennett, another brilliant man, also struggled with morality. I highly recommend his autobiography, Witness: the Story of a Search, in which he writes candidly and openly about his flaws and mistakes.
After going whole hog with Subud he realized that though Subud provided “highs,” it did nothing to develop the will. Many people go down similar attractive but dead-end roads which lead perhaps to some lofty state, some Cosmic Bliss – Conscious Effort but no Intentional Suffering.
The Work supplies a set of ideas and techniques which may enable one to understand and participate in the Cosmic evolutionary project – in Gurdjieff’s metaphor, to act as a neuron in the brain of the “Unfathomable.”
Bennett also experienced difficulty in escaping from his early Christian conditioning: the Good/Evil trap, and the “waiting for the Messiah” trap, as evidenced by his relations with Pak Subuh and Idries Shah. He hoped for “higher powers” to tell him what to do. He did realize, perhaps too late, that no one was going to “save” him – that he had to find the answer in himself. He started a School at Sherbourne, teaching from his own understanding, but died a few years later.
***
When I first encountered the Work, at the age of fourteen, I imagined that you would work for a time and then achieve enlightenment or something and then you would just sit there like an angel on a cloud. I asked my teacher, “What is the method of the Work?” He just laughed. Years later I realized one does not reach any final goal. Work on yourself ends only with death (and perhaps not even then!)
Despite giving it lip service, most people, sadly, do not really want freedom. The way of freedom, uncertain, often uncomfortable, requiring responsibility and difficult decisions and sacrifices, appeals only to a few – those whom (as Gurdjieff said) the worm gnaws.
And why did Gurdjieff crash his car? This sage, this adept who collected ancient teachings from all over Asia and Africa, this master who understood more about the human body and psychology than almost anyone ever, just fell asleep and drove his car at full speed right into a tree? Hard to believe. Maybe indeed this supreme gesture, perhaps his ultimate intentional suffering, sums up his teaching in a way that words never can. A warning, a caveat: runaway technology can destroy even the wisest human being, even humanity itself. Who sits in the driver’s seat?
What a mad world we live in where huge factories produce nothing but gadgets whose sole purpose is destruction of human lives and property!
And let’s not forget that he, against all odds, recovered from this near fatal accident and went on to write his books and resume teaching: perhaps in spite of all, humanity can survive and thrive, even if we run into a few trees along the way.
Beelzebub, the protagonist in Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, evolved nearly the highest degree of reason possible for a three brained being. If he had not been exiled far from the source and constrained to observe and carry out tasks for the benefit of the warped creatures of the planet Earth, he would not have attained this level.
Gurdjieff’s stated his purpose in writing his first and longest series, Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson: to destroy all the traditional inherited mentation of contemporary humans. All and Everything. All the traditional ways of thinking – the essence of Shiva, Lord of Destruction. The old must perish so the new can thrive. In order to enter the new age, we must ruthlessly perform surgery on our most cherished beliefs and mental models – hack them up and bury them in the compost heap.
“Our sun is black, and gives neither light, nor heat.”
AUM Gurdjieff
* Armenian: duty = պարտք – transliterated: partk’; Russian: duty = долг – transliterated: dolg.↩