The Corporeal Fantasy Read online

  Here are some steps that I've found useful. You'll have to find your own steps. One of the most meaningful things that was ever said to me in the work was that you have to find your own way; you are responsible for it. No one's going to give you the formula to make your progress in this. You are responsible for it, you find your way and if what somebody else says is useful then pick it up and use it, otherwise discard it because it might not be useful for you. So number one: observe the wolf. Now, this is much more difficult than you think because we're so conditioned to look upon behavior such as promiscuity, drinking, smoking, maybe liking lots of different kinds of food for example - we're taught to look upon these earthly pleasures as a sin, but actually your wolf likes all that kind of stuff. And you have to watch it while it's going about its business. Do not try and stop it. Watch it. Do not criticize - observe and do not judge, and that is difficult. It takes a long time to get to that point because you have to change your ideas, you have to change the way you think about what you are and how your body behaves. You have to understand the wolf; you have to understand that the survival instinct drives it. It only wants to reproduce and to eat and to survive, and it will do almost anything to try and achieve that. You have to be honest about that, and you have to look at the bestial nature of the wolf because if you are in denial about it then you are in denial about a part of yourself and it will create more mischief than if you look at it honestly, openly, without judgment and just look at the way it behaves. If you want to see the wolf in full flight, then you only have to look at an invading army. An invading army is interested in rape, pillage, and murder. That is the wolf in full flight and we all have that within us: do not think that you do not have that within you. You do. There have been many experiments, psychological experiments carried out that show we are all capable of these things. Well, I say the word all, maybe there are a few people who are not, but I’ll mention the Stamford Prison Experiments where one group of students were told to be prisoners and another group were told to be guards. The experiment was abandoned because the guards were abusing the prisoners. These were just ordinary students. But the guards were given a little bit of power, and they went crazy with it, and they were starting to torture the prisoners. Just ordinary students, normal guys, meet them in the street or the pub, perfectly pleasant, wonderful people. Give them a little bit of authority, and they turn into beasts. Well, they didn't turn into beasts, the beast was already there. The beast just needed a little bit of license, and that's what it got. Be honest about yourself and honest about the human race and honest about nature. Nature does not give a dam about you. Sorry to say that, but it's true. You're a tiny, tiny part, infinitesimally small part of a great huge machine that may or may not have some cosmic purpose. But that great huge machine has no interest in you or me, it has interest in numbers, but it doesn't have interest in individuals. If you want to become something other than the animal that you were given when you were born, then you have to work on yourself to establish that.

  Now for some honesty about nature. Most of us like to pretend that nature is all beautiful and rosy. Well, I can look out my window, and it's a beautiful view. I look down a valley to the ocean, and it's wonderful. But start to lift the stones and look in the trees and what you find in the main is animals savaging each other. Somebody very, very accurately described it as a carnival of carnage. And that's what nature is, a carnival of carnage and you have to come to terms with that as well as looking at all the pretty stuff, the eye candy. We all like the eye candy. Lovely sunsets over the sea, beautiful vistas down a valley to the ocean, incredible. But there's the other side of it as well, and this is one of the things in life. Everything has two aspects to it as far as we humans are concerned. We like to focus on the pleasurable side, the life-affirming side and we want to negate or pretend that the life-threatening side doesn't exist, but of course it does. If you can be honest about those things, then a strange thing happens. What happens is that all that horror becomes less impactful and less threatening. So because as far as nature's concerned, you are nothing then do not expect anything. Nature is not going to serve your needs because you are special in some way. When you wake up in the morning, and this is a practice I do every morning; I tell myself that I can expect nothing. I can't even expect to make it to the end of the day. And you know what? That liberates me more than I can tell you. I'm doing the opposite of what most people do - plan their day. They're going to go here at this time, do that at that time, see this person, have a nice lunch, and so on. And of course, something's going to go wrong during the day. When it goes wrong, they're going to be pissed off, and they're going to be unhappy. If you can tell yourself in the morning expect nothing, the train will not arrive on time, when I try to start the car it will not start, then when your day flows smoothly, it will be like nirvana. You won't believe that things can be so good. It's all about expectations and attitudes. I've diverged a little bit from the central theme here.

  The take away is become friendly with your wolf, be on good terms with it, don't try and constrain it with some half-baked notions of what is good and bad. Give it some free rein, give it some pleasure, but most importantly observe it, understand it, be honest about it. Be honest about what your wolf means to nature; it means nothing. There are seven billion of us on this planet. Something like ten million people die every year; it's just a big recycling machine. If you can understand nature and see what nature is, this huge machine that has no interest in individual creatures, then you can in some way become free of it, and freedom must be one of the things that you want - I would imagine anyway.

  YOU HAVE PROBABLY NEVER KNOWN A HUMAN BEING

  What characterizes the human animal is the passions, the emotions. Things like hatred, envy, fear, greed, and there's a long list of these things. These emotions are derived from some notion of survival. And that may not be immediately clear to you, so let’s talk about that.

  The prime differentiator between the human animal and the human being is reason, and because it’s so important, we need to dwell on the idea or notion of reason for a while. It’s important because from the Greeks through to the Renaissance philosophers, and through to modern day philosophers it has formed the bedrock of their work. Unfortunately, we don't hear the word reason used a great deal in so-called spiritual practice, and there are various drivers for that, but Gurdjieff used it when he talked of objective reason. The kind of reason we're talking about is not what many people consider it to be - logic, mathematics and so on. Logic says something like if X equals Y, and Y equals Z, then X equals Z. These are empty statements, but modern philosophers and logicians delight in playing around with those kinds of things, and if that keeps them happy then so be it. The ‘reason’ we're talking about is more the ability to, well as Gurdjieff infers or implies in the phrase 'objective reason,' to be objective. If you are involved in some dispute with your neighbor over your barking dog say, then if you could be objective and apply objective reason, you would say well yes, it’s not right that my dog is barking in the morning. An unreasonable person would probably say well it's my dog, my house, and my dog can do whatever the hell it wants in my house. And that is the attitude you get from probably quite a few people. Reason is the ability to a large extent to step outside your private little hell and view the wider perspective. And maybe we'll go into how wide that perspective could be a little bit later on. The human animal has virtually no reason or very little of it. If you think I'm unkind, I'm not, this is the way most of us are, and there are causes for that which I'll get into shortly. The human being has, in many situations, the ability to apply reason. Not every case, because a human being still lives in a body, and still has the human animal to contend with.

  The human animal is an animal that wants to survive. This drive for survival was well recognized in ancient times; people called it the conatus. It's there in every animal. You see an animal that's hunting or an animal that is being hunted, and you see the conatus at work, You see th
e terror in the eyes of a deer that is being felled by a lion say, and you know the conatus at work.

  Survival is our primary driver. Now if things happen that threaten your survival you will feel what is traditionally called negative emotions; hatred, fear and so on. If things are going well for you, things that reinforce your survival, then you will feel what people very often call positive emotions. Both what we call positive emotions and negative emotions are passions. They are our responses to external stimuli. We might get a new partner that we think is particularly attractive and all of a sudden we feel more uplifted, more positive, and our world goes well. Or, we lose a whole pile of money, and we feel threatened. For example, if you are on the road driving along and someone cuts you up, your blood pressure is going to go up; you're going to feel threatened. You're going to get angry, and the road is a very, very good barometer for how people are honestly reacting to each other because they're in a slightly competitive situation. This behavior is the human animal at work. It will always protect its territory and more than that, it will try and grab the territory of others. If you look at our society and you look at the way that large corporations work, the way governments operate and so on, the people who are involved in those type of organizations are inherently predatory. They have to be, to get where they are. They are the alpha animals in the zoo. They are the ones who have been the most successful at effectively exploiting the weaker. Again, this is all animal behavior. Lions eat weaker animals, even within a particular species a dominant male is very often established, and if any animal tries to threaten that order then there's trouble, and the old guard may win or it may not. But this is the human animal driven by passions. We see that today more than we've seen it for maybe at least 50 years. Nationalism is a direct manifestation of the human animal. It is all about territory. Territory - this is my territory, everybody else keep out. The way that large corporations consume smaller businesses and grow into new territory, into new products, it’s all predatory. There's an excellent book called Sapiens, and I recommend it if you want to understand the human animal. We became the most dominant form of the human species because we were the most aggressive, and the most cunning. There were several species of humans, the Neanderthal being one. And of course, Neanderthal is portrayed as being this sort of brutish, clumsy thing. It’s not true. Neanderthals were fairly intelligent. What they lacked was the cunning of homo sapiens, and the ability to create abstractions. Abstractions like a nation, abstractions like corporations, these things don't exist in reality, they're just abstract notions. But human beings have this ability to group behind a concept. And because of that, they formed large groups that could overcome smaller groups. And so we are a particularly unpleasant species that has come to dominate, and that unpleasantness is now being turned upon ourselves. This is the human animal, purely driven by the survival instinct, in the main.

  Let’s talk about the human being as opposed to the human animal. The human being is a creature that can apply reason to situations. Now our society is not wholly animalistic. If it were people would be murdering each other for the least little slight. Fortunately, we have laws and what some people call the thin veneer of society. Well, thank goodness for that thin veneer, because if it weren't there, then murders and theft and all kinds of crimes would be just an everyday affair for all of us. You may be aware of the breakdown of law that happened in Montreal, I think it was in the 60's, possibly in the 70's, where the police went on strike for 18 hours. During that time revenge murders took place, extensive looting, theft, you name it, and I think the police had to cut short their strike. In various African nations when the law has broken down for protracted periods, then behavior has degenerated into cannibalism. If law broke down for prolonged periods of time in any western nation, you would end up with the same thing. This is the human animal being let free. Fortunately, we have laws. Laws are some measure of the application of reason. And the laws say that to a large extent we need to respect each other’s property, relationships, and territory. It's mainly a territory thing. Because of these laws we don't have this widespread violence and theft and so on. This is an example of reason being used in our society to some extent. Now, this doesn't stop people who are wealthy using very, very expensive lawyers for their ends. It's well known if you want to win a legal case you just get the best lawyers, it doesn't matter, in many circumstances, whether you're guilty or innocent, you get the best lawyers. But reason is the ability to view things in a broader context - broader than our individual little needs and desires. Reason would say that it's not a good idea for people to lie to each other because lying creates confusion. The confusion is a negative thing because it causes people to act in ways that are suboptimal. If someone lies to you about the route between one place and another, then you are going to spend maybe hours and hours traveling in a direction that doesn't take you any nearer to where you want to go. It’s the same when politicians lie to the electorate. The electorate believe one thing is happening and something else is happening, and so the electorate suffers. And the same when businesses lie about how they're not polluting the environment, or how they're making their profits, or whether they're exploiting under-aged workers, and the endless lies that take place. The human being is a very, very rare thing.

  There are shades of gray naturally, with real animal behavior you'll only see in battlefield situations with invading armies raping, pillaging, murdering. The human animal has free reign in that circumstance. But the human being is a very, very rare thing. A person that can apply reason in situations and assess the case fairly, and act impartially is incredibly rare. In fact, so unique that maybe none of us have met such a person. Or very few of us at least anyway.

  The fact that there are so few human beings is because to exercise reason you need to have, in some way, to able to control the passions, the emotions. There is no point being in a situation where you need to use a fair and objective assessment when your passions are telling you to steal, or to get your own back, or take some revenge, or to make yourself appear more significant than you are. Most social situations consist of people bigging themselves up. There is no reason there at all. There is no thinking of, well here's my friend, let's have a good time together. Braggadocio tends to increase as people get older, because as people get older they usually get more and more empty within themselves, and so they have to apply more and more strategies to make themselves look big, and that bigging up usually consists of boasting about property or various achievements, what they've acquired, or done in their life. The ability of people to act reasonably diminishes very often with age. And so, our planet is almost entirely populated by human animals. I think it’s part of what Gurdjieff would call the terror of the situation. There have been enlightenment figures who have to some extent helped us apply reason so that we make a tolerable environment for ourselves. Dumping thousands and millions of tons of plastic in the ocean is not a reasonable thing to do, chopping down the rainforest is not a reasonable thing to do, polluting the air is not a reasonable thing to do, exhausting the earth's resources is not a reasonable thing to do. These are all the actions of a human animal that has no control over its passions. And unfortunately, the people who lead our society both commercially, economically and politically are human animals in the main, that's how they got there. It’s a very scary situation, and if you want to understand why mankind, the human species, goes around in circles, it's because the human animal will always indulge its appetite for dominating the weaker. All we end up with is the psychopaths and the madmen at the top of society, until it breaks down - like in ancient Rome, characters like Nero and Caligula. Totally insane, totally power crazy, possessed by their passions, and this is what we have today because the laws are not sufficient to constrain all the lunatics that are at the top of our society. We see this insane behavior, and it is a prelude to the degeneration of civilization, at least as is currently happening in the west anyway. It's just the way these things work.

  To summar
ize. Human animals are driven entirely by the survival instinct. Human beings can exercise some level of reason in their dealings with each other and in the way they organize their own lives. But human beings are very, very rare individuals and compared with an animal, a lion in full attack, a reasonable person might look weak. However, a reasonable person would not be weak, a reasonable person would be prepared. He's going to shoot the dam thing in the head because that is in all of us. The reasonable person also has the animal within. And as Gurdjieff said, the wolf can devour the lamb at any time.

  EMOTIONS MAKE YOU INHUMAN

  People are very attached to their emotions and pain, and so I’m deliberately poking the hornet’s nest here to some degree, and I’ve decided to take some of Gurdjieff’s advice and go the whole hog including the postage.

  Many people readily confuse reason with emotions. They will point to ideologies and say how our abstractions and intellectualism have caused so much suffering. In reality, however, both reason and the intellect are entirely powerless. It is the emotions where all the power lies. Hitler was said to have excited all the nasty little biases and hatreds within people who followed him. Without that soup of putrid emotions, he would have had no power, and his ideology would have been impotent.

  A brief list of the emotions will show that most of them are destructive – hatred, disdain, envy, jealousy, pride, greed, fear, hope … The so-called positive emotion of love can also turn into hate with ease. Just watch a jilted lover spit venom at a person they once adored.