“You Need These People”

After being in a group with a teacher for about two decades can one continue to deeply explore the unknown expanse of the spiritual and work on oneself without a teacher, a group? That was a question that arose for me. It’s been a little over two years since I left organized group work. My specific reasons, I will not expound upon in much detail though some strong hints are given in what follows. Before I get to the initial question let’s explore the relationship that preceded the decision to leave, that is the twenty years in a group and some general pitfalls any seeker of truth faces. This will be written without specificity as to the teacher or people in the group while attempting to put forth an honest expression of my experience.

To begin with as an absolute base for understanding: the Group and Teacher, myself, were/are all fallible, but with a very few exceptions the people in the group, were (over the twenty years), good people, having been called to a serious quest for the evolution of their consciousness. Being clear and speaking generally a teacher’s fallibility should always, but often isn’t acknowledged or understood. People often are looking for perfection, the word of God through a perfected embodied being. They project this on a teacher and all too often the teacher allows this, and may even encourage it, and far worse, some demand it. This can have many negative consequences, but two were seen repeatedly. First, there can be continual disappointment for a seeker who never takes a teacher, looking only for perfection and becoming a spiritual tourist; and second, for the particularly suggestable, a belief in such infallibility and the allowing of resultant expressions and or acceptance of absurd explanations of obvious fallibility, and thus an excusing and an inner abating of certain actions and reactions of the teacher. In this regard I could not speak to this as well as J.G. Bennett does in his book Witness (page 160). Bennett writes, “When I found myself in the position of a spiritual teacher, and saw that my most ill-considered suggestions were taken as inspired utterances, I became aware of the necessity for anyone who has the task of guiding others in spiritual matters to abstain from hiding his own defects and mistakes, and to make sure that no one shall look upon him as an authority in his own right.” My response to Mr Bennett: yes, yes, yes.

In point of fact, I did realize my Teacher’s fallibility after coming to work with this group as a unique experience, certainly not from day one but relatively quickly. And so, a warning: if a teacher claims and or acts with a sense of infallibility my advice would be to skedaddle. It’s not that one cannot benefit from being in such a situation but to benefit, without or with only limited associated inner trama, requires a level of being that most do not begin with nor develop.

I suppose, before continuing, there needs mention of the two things Americans, according to Gurdjieff, are most interested in and motivated by: sex and money. I have to say, as to these all too common issues that often plague certain groups, neither were an issue in the group I was in. While this work wasn’t “free” (it cannot be) the teacher was not a money focused person and I am not aware of any sexual shenanigans where power was used to extract sexual favors. These were not issues in my group, so I cannot write of them other than what is above.

The Situation

Ramana Maharshi said there are two ways: ask yourself ‘who am I’ (self-inquiry) or submit (to the guru who is enlightened or said to be). How many Westerners would choose submission? Very few intellectually, but a remarkable number desire this emotionally, which is often a much stronger influence. Clearly, the submission Maharshi speaks of must be a self-submission, a conscious submission as opposed to forced, involuntary or mechanical. And yet Gurdjieff says, “The fear of being subordinated to another man’s will very often proves stronger than anything else. A man does not realize that a subordination to which he consciously agrees is the only way to acquire a will of his own.” (Search 116) Here is what is often lost, the teacher is to be a helper on the way to real freedom, but too often the teacher is or becomes a bar, as a dependence develops in which one’s aim is lost. Can a student ask: What am I doing here?

Perhaps the word “intentional” or “knowing” in substitution of the word “conscious” in the above quote would be appropriate, because in the beginning most students have only a rudimentary level of consciousness, a functional consciousness. Submission to a guru/teacher without bounds entails risk. Abuse of this submission has been well documented and is not isolated or rare. And yet, giving one’s will to the teacher (temporarily one should hope) is often demanded in one form or another to one degree or another and depending on the individual may be needed. In my case I did “submit” my spiritual will and spiritual life, that which I most highly valued, to a teacher but kept my ordinary life separate; that is, I separated the financial, family and interpersonal aspects of life. Was this true submission in the way Ramana Marhashi spoke of? No, but it was not nothing. There was a regular incantation to “put the Work first.” What the “Work” means is the group, your duties to the group and requirements of being in the group. For the most part it does not mean one’s individual work, though of course there is not a real distinction, as we work on ourselves in any situation; ordinary life or group life. But to be clear the term put the Work first was almost always used in the context of a conflict between ordinary life and Work life. Such as I can’t make the work day because…fill in the blank. In my case I put my family first and the Work a very close second, but always tried to avoid conflict between the two. In my case that was possible, for others, with young children or demanding spouses not in the Work, the demand on one’s time can create a very difficult situation.

It was rather self-evident from the history of my life before entering group work that I neither needed nor wanted “direction” as to matters of ordinary life. And so, I never asked for such a direction, and it was only very rarely offered. To the teacher’s credit, it wasn’t demanded of me. Occasionally, conflicts would arise, but these were worked through. The Teacher, to quote the title of a book about Gurdjieff, was not a “Master in Life.” That said he had many fine qualities and had truly “come to something” as to being and understanding. However, I saw many in my group being directed on an ordinary life level and believed this to have been a serious error for both student and teacher. But as I was unaffected, I said nothing other than noting, without comment, to a few students the difference in my relationship with the Teacher. Additionally, I also made the statement to a few other students that if you ask for the teacher’s advice (I was speaking of ordinary life matters but it pertains to the spiritual also, even more so), that if given, you must follow it, regardless of a conceptualized or actual level of intelligence. If you are unwilling to do so, do not ask.

There is a saying: weak in life, weak in the Work. This statement, as such generalities do, has validity but not absolute validity. And certainly, strong in life, strong in Work is often untrue. Gurdjieff said the Work begins at the level of the householder and with a disappointment of ordinary life, this seems quite right. For me the problem was not a lack of success or weakness in ordinary life, I had been successful and was quite competent in many ways. I had married young, started a difficult and complex but ultimately successful business which I ran for over 23 years and helped raise 3 wonderful children, all adults by the time my marriage failed, disintegrated and I entered group work. However, competence does not equate to consciousness. I needed spiritual help, to work on myself and further explore areas I had been in contact with before and around the age of
responsibility.

It is also very true my competence was used by the Teacher; as I led, and completed many many difficult assignments and projects to the Teacher’s often very discerning satisfaction. The demands were often quite intense and difficult. And at times, like Gurdjieff’s directions to his students, made no practical sense. I can only remember one instance where I refused to do a Work-related task because it felt deeply wrong. This refusal, upon my explanation, was not objected to by the Teacher. This was part of the give and take and my work. Part of the conditions established to break down the conditioning of ordinary life and allow for real life to begin to be experienced, as well as to work on the three lines of Work. Regardless of many difficulties, I got much help from group work and my Teacher; and I have no regrets about having given twenty years of my life to the Work with this group and its teacher. Or for that matter, there are no regrets as to leaving when I did. I could not have come to my current understanding by myself or by staying in the group. There is a season for all things. The conditions provided were necessary for me and probably for nearly all people who truly wish for transformative change. I got a lot and I gave a lot. I feel it was a fair trade.

This Work is voluntary so one can in theory always and anytime leave, the barriers are only psychological (this is nothing to make light of). I was also told, after being asked to enter the Work, in an action somewhat akin to being warned that there are sharks after jumping in the water, that this was a school that you never graduate from. What that means needs to be pondered in the context of a spiritual work. However, given the situation in the group as it changed leadership, its momentum faltered and turned to stasis and the level of my own work being considered, the possibility arose within to drop out. Putting the question out of the mental and into the deepest of feeling gave no answer. At first there was no understanding as to why I couldn’t get a simple answer of yes or no, stay or go. At some point it came to me that what I was asking was a dualistic question from the mind but asking for an answer to come out of non-dual being which was neutral. Such a yes/no answer was impossible. But oddly, after seeing the absurdity of the question it was realized it had already been answered months earlier. There had been a direct perception that if I lived and worked in a certain manner it didn’t matter whether I stayed or left. I could work and be anywhere. So, it was decided to complete the assignment and project I was working on and use their completion as a point of departure.

Many people came into the group over my 20 years of group work and the group was well established when I began to work with it. Some stayed, some left, and upon leaving some were badly defamed, others simply never spoken of again, but never did I hear, “It is rightful, we wish for them the best.” So, there was a knowing what would likely happen. It was said to me and others long before I left that when people leave, that initially they feel “liberated” almost euphoric for a while, and then fall into depression, regret, or blame/anger/negativity. I experienced very little of such swings of emotion. What’s been the experience since leaving? It’s been said that being in a group such as I was in, eviscerates your social life. Having moved from out of state to work with the group this was particularly true for me. And I knew a transition to a life out of group work, at my age, would be difficult on this level and it has proven so. I had some very good friends in the group, that I will quite likely never see again, other than perhaps in passing, and in this there is sadness. But a work group is not a social club. I knowingly tried to leave without negativity. This proved impossible as I could only control my side, the Teacher after initially being gracious went in the opposite direction. While I fully expected this, I had sincerely hoped and worked for a different outcome. But from my Teacher’s perspective and likely almost all teachers, an individual will be, must be, sacrificed for the sake of the group, group preservation was paramount, to the Teacher. I find this attitude understandable and perhaps even necessary, but it sows the seeds of passivity and dependence among students. But there comes an inherent unspoken movement towards an attitude: don’t ask questions, don’t question anything the teacher does or says, don’t rock the boat. This fosters a reliance on the teacher and not on one’s own self-exploration and self-discovery. Passivity in the Work is not considered a good posture and yet the entire structure of a hierarchical group encourages passivity, an avoidance of risk and to any questioning that may open the possibility of concomitant negativity.

In fact, if one is conscious of what arises internally in such situations and has the understanding to actively work with it, working with the denying force can become an extremely potent force for transformation and the growth of being. But a question arose: should one strictly for reasons of one’s own work, use this force and in effect exploit the group situation? Three or four years before I left the group the Teacher and I found ourselves alone while walking together to lunch, during a work day. There was silence and presence and then out of the blue he said, “You need these people.” At the time, this was understood to be a warning not to leave, that there were opportunities here that could not be found elsewhere. The warning felt genuine, sincere. But was the converse also true, that they needed me? I later saw that while I was quite “useful” in some ways, the devotion to the teacher and his assistant (and appointed successor) was such that any questioning of doctrine or direction even through verified experience and with the best of intentions to further explore certain topics, only brought jealousy and negativity. Which, in fact, did allow more opportunity to work with the denying force. But there was an issue: the students’ reliance on the teacher left no opportunity to explore with other group members. And so outside of the rigid structure imposed by the teacher, the hidden world that exists beyond and behind the thin veil we take as reality was almost never discussed. Doing so was seen as taking on the role of a teacher.

What was seen was a rigid hierarchy that tamped down individual growth in the service of group growth. This can be acceptable if there is evolution of the group. However, as noted above, the group situation came to be seen as one of stasis for some years before Covid and after Covid came, regression, (I have no idea where it is at present). And it became very apparent that group preservation in some form was the highest priority and everything else was in service to it. But things do not remain static for long; they either grow or regress. Quoting Mr. Bennett again after he and others received notice in 1941, from their teacher P.D. Ouspensky, that they were simply to maintain the work in England “on the highest possible level” as received, take no initiative simply maintain. Bennett writes, “… seemed to me impossible of fulfillment…for me the Work was something dynamic that was alive only when it was expanding. The history of religion and of spiritual movements shows that, when the impulse to search and move forward gives place to the impulse to hold on and preserve, the death knell has been sounded.” (Witness 189) So to stay and work with the denying force, because I wished like Bennett for a dynamic group, an expanding group, and that had not happened in some years and things had become more and more insular and rigid. This push/pull definitely provided a fantastic inner work, but to me it seemed unworthy and somehow off to only stay for this work with the denying force. And the world can provide the same opportunities without standing on the backs of people who are sincerely trying to work. Even given the waning of group energy that was occurring, I will say the ordinary world can only rarely allow for experiences of the level of intensity experienced in a group if one is open to it. Such is the fodder and fuel that group work with a teacher can provide. But I understood and it felt best to “leave them alone.”

The conclusion

And so, to answer the question that we began with: Can one continue to deeply explore the unknown expanse of the spiritual and work on oneself without a teacher, a group? My answer is an unhesitant yes, but I qualify it by noting that there is not the slightest shred of doubt, that without the previous work with a group and teacher it would not have been possible. Did it need to be twenty years? That is an unanswerable question. It was…what it was. Additionally, there is no doubt that I retained all that I had come to during those 20 years and have since continued work on my own while coming to deeper and deeper levels of understanding. In essence, as we work, even in a group setting, we are alone. The group is a support, and a very valuable support. We live and work in the world with people that are “mad machines”, the group was a sanctuary of sort but its structure and demands became, at some point, vestigial. These days I am in contact (in person, not zoom) with a small group of like-minded people, of similar background and interest, exploring non-judgmentally, non-hierarchically, ideas and experiences we find important and are willing to share and discuss. As Gurdjieff said, the first line of work is the most important: work for yourself. Put another way as Gurdjieff explained to his all female mostly lesbian group in Paris 1936,

So in my “dog house”…l live and work…to be.

The group is the helper, the group is the bar. The teacher is the helper, the teacher is the bar.

RDM
February 2024

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