The Question Remains of the Body

Can we say that Gurdjieff’s teaching is primarily directed toward the body, a remembering of the body? In a provisional way, can we remain open to an unknown direction? And can we say that the teaching forbids compelling the body in any way, that it is for rather than against the body?

Can the question bring a reorientation, a return to experience—or to an experience of return? What is there to discover is an opening that closes and gives me back to everyday experience in its confusion, leaving only an intimation of the beyond. What calls? There is in the body a source that remains a mystery. It is a singular indication of an influence that, when felt, has the power to transform the body. We are reminded of Gurdjieff’s appeal to the Biblical: “Awake, die, be reborn.”¹

Only while studying experience carefully does one become sensitive to the absence, but not with dreams of impossible realizations. One needs the aim of the work: to awaken. Over time and with application, we learn that the attention must become more precise, more free from the things to which it attaches. That it must become less inertial without betraying its passive side. It must finally learn the meaning of the simple gesture, “let.”

*One doesn’t know much about the body. The body without the mediating word “about,” but from a work with and from the body; a work foundational in Gurdjieff’s legacy, a basis—the cornerstone of the temple—on which to further understanding of the human condition. It begins an octave of work. It is an initiation through which any seeker of awakening must pass. Alas, it has an evasive ambiguity. Can we investigate that experience which any talk about the body seeks to express, that which lies at the heart of the body experience, in action or in stillness and rest? It lacks a name, but one could say it is simply pure movement, stripped of all qualities (tempo, rhythm, accent). Then, when it affects the body makes it what it is and how it serves a search to awaken.

Why do we lack an impression of the embodied life?

We have impressions of our lives as bodily, but they are sensory. The senses message us about things outside and inside, coded as sensations. What we remember of our life is a collection of sensory traces. This memory suspends a need for anything but the lowest level of attentiveness. Gurdjieff’s prime axiom follows: “Man is asleep.”² In that state, an impression of embodied life, “being-body” life, is missing. Impressions of this or that impose themselves without effort. By contrast, an impression of embodiment is subtle; its appearance requires a voluntary act. “Embodied life” is the impression of an impersonal animating force contained within the vessel of the physical body. In Gurdjieff, it is the second body, the body Kesdjan, that offering an impression of itself, indicates the existence of an other life, of a kind other than biological existence.³

The life-force in a moment of balance, when thought, feeling, and sensation are in dynamic equilibrium, is felt directly. That experience is different in kind, in level, from what takes place everyday. An automatic collaboration of perception and memory has been stilled. One is able to “step back” from the foreground, which holds reactions to a situation, and turn toward an essence, hidden in the background. In the turn is a preliminary offer of freedom.

Because the sensation of embodied life is an anomaly, it appears without a cause. The power of volition that harnesses the body in service of self-interest has been surrendered. One stops, submits to a situation, and awaits a response to it. If only for a moment, the experience of embodied life appears in “the empty place.” The emptiness doesn’t disappear, nor is it replaced by the impression. Embodied life shows itself against a background that has no boundaries. It presents itself together with an experience of limitless spaciousness, an experience of scale, of a higher level, of the divine. The resonance of stillness.

The question is still of the body.

At the same time, there is a practice that respects the mystery without putting it to rest. Central to Gurdjieff’s thought, it offers indications of a miraculous endowment, the sensation of embodied life. Lesser or greater, it is recognizable in its immediacy and directness. With it comes an awareness of the paradoxical sensation. Two disparate things, the body and the life embodied, are in some marvelous fashion conjoined in one seamless event, my life. Blending produces a new experience of wholeness. The life I live is felt to be whole, as well as I who live it. Yet, the two energies remain distinguishable.

Let me pause with the phenomenon. Something unmanifest is felt to enter the sphere of ordinary human experience. Can one say that a formless energy has been transformed into matter and brought to one’s most private intimacy? The questions remain a question. Madame de Salzmann offers a suggestion. The descent of spirit occurs in a materialization that “takes on a definite density” to become apparent to us. It is the event of incarnation.⁴

We know that the impression of embodied life is highly perishable. It must be constantly replenished. Over time, a new substance that combines materials of two different kinds or levels, but is neither one nor the other, is accumulated. It has force to consciously direct establishment of consciousness. It marks the birth of a new entity, a new body. Meister Eckhart uses the metaphor of pregnancy when speaking of transformation.⁵

When we talk of “embodied wisdom,” the heart of the theme is incarnation. It signifies the precise moment when a conscious intelligence, whose origin lies on a higher level and which differs in kind from an earthly mentality, appears. We are called to bear witness to the event, and more especially, to attest to the collaborative nature of its call. A willing determination is needed to actualize the second body and to allow its virtual reality to have an influence on daily life. Determination is the key ingredient in the practice of participation. When it occurs, we become, in Gurdjieff’s thought, “assistants to the Creator.”⁶ We become co-creators in a cosmos of unspeakable immensity and complexity that is at present time in danger of running down, growing dark to consciousness, dying.

But we are far from accepting what Gurdjieff tells us, that our subconsciousness alone provides access to the real. Contact, a direct perception of that which it sees is necessary, instead of an overview of the thing. The impression of embodiment Henri Corbin in his studies of Sufism calls the “imaginal” body.⁷ It derives from neither the mind (thought) nor the physical body (perception) but from a third thing.

Standing on that middle ground lets us be closer to another reality. More importantly, it is protection. It guards approaches to a most holy site. Buried in the subconscious is that which would have us awaken, disrupting our comfort and convenience. It is called conscience.

Objective conscience, in Gurdjieff’s thought, should not be mistaken for an ‘voice’ that makes cowards of us all. The moral guide that we take to be conscientious is a product of cultural conditioning or social training. By contrast, objective conscience is absolute. It provides the spark of awakening that, like Eckhart’s scintilla, is given with birth on the planet.⁸ What needs saying is this: since Gurdjieff calls conscience the “inner God” as well as the “representative of the Creator,” conscience marks the highest intelligence within us.⁹ Relative to our experience, it is the beyond.

The force of the question originates from that holy place we seek hither and yon, which turns out to be found within. Its discovery happens like in the tale Heinrich Zimmer tells of the impoverished rabbi from a nameless shtetl who dreams three times of great treasure buried in the capital city, Krakow.¹⁰ Meeting impassible obstacles in his travels there, but with a new clue, he returns home to discover a chest of gold beneath his own hearth.

One can sense how the intelligence relentlessly goads us to remember the question of our being, of who we are. To awaken to our own reality. Without mounting to consciousness, from within the subconscious, an impulse aims directly at the person under question.¹¹ It points a finger. It singles that person out from all other “three-brained beings” in the universe. The situation brings a familiar feeling. Conscience. Only he or she is in a position to respond, to exercise a will that is beyond personal. Conscience, one senses, individuates in the way that death does: as no one else can die in my place, so no one else can answer for me. I am brought face to face with my singularity. No one else can make my response. In front of the call, there is no way for individuality not to be affirmed—except by denial.

This fact gives me pause. In moments, for many of us, an apprehension of one’s own death is given. Gurdjieff writes of the need for a new organ that would make that encounter more durable, that it would become a “reminding factor.” The supreme reminding factor.¹² It would then serve to call the attention once again to the ambiguous nature of “body.” Remembering my own death would function (if that is the right word) by confronting me with the impression of embodied life, its time-limit, even its purpose. Both conscience and the ‘second’ organ would be on the side of awakening to life. They both would point to a secret identity hidden beyond, where a unity binds the two into one unique whole.

The whole is not given. It must be forged.