“I teach that when it rains the pavement gets wet.”
Oh the blessings of ignorance and fantasy.
Life is so much easier when we don’t make the effort to dig for truth, or when we delight in the delusions of who we are.
Ignorance enables us to avoid work. Fantasy enables us to avoid reality.
Some people are able to live their lives without suffering the consequences of ignorance or shattering the illusions of the world and their place in it. Most of us are not so lucky.
One of my favorite authors is George Gurdjieff.
He has been referred to as a mystic, a magician, a philosopher, a teacher of dance, a composer, and a spiritual guru among many other labels.
For me, he articulated another way to live and to be in his writings called “The Work.” What I most admire about Gurdjieff is his emphasis on respect, restraint, and resourcefulness. He believed in compassion for other human beings, the importance of restraining our desires and impulses, and the resourcefulness required to live a fully awake life.
He was “woke” way before the term was invented and insisted that being awake meant dedicated work and effort.
In short, we must work to awake.
Fighting ignorance and destroying fantasies were his calling cards.
After reading dozens of books by and about Gurdjieff I began to broaden my search for meaning, but his philosophy still serves as the ground on which my ideas have developed.
Two books I recently read are examples of two sprouts from the ground that flowered in the fields that Gurdjieff tilled—Braiding Sweetgrass and Transcendent Kingdom.
Braiding Sweetgrass is a beautiful book of poetic prose by Robin Wall Kimmerer—a Native American, botanist, scholar, professor, and poet.
Reading this book will change your relationship with the Earth forever, because it is like taking a walk through Mother Nature in a way that you have probably never experienced before.
When I finished reading the book, I was amazed at how ignorant I have been about so many gifts that Nature generously provides.
Kimmerer helps us open our mind and heart to visualize what it feels like to traipse through woods, fields, and streams through a lens that magnifies the beauty of each plant and animal you will encounter. You will discover how easily science and spirituality weave together from a body of knowledge that is deep and hard earned. Reading the book will deepen your appreciation of the Earth as a gift that deserves our reciprocity and reverence. You will discover what it feels like to go into a forest in search of a black ash tree that is ready to be a basket. You will learn to reimagine what raising children in a society that teaches gratitude instead of greed might look like.
Here is the prayer that third graders in Onondaga Nation recite at the beginning of each school week:
“Today we have gathered and when we look upon the faces around us we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now let us bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as People. Now our minds are one.”
Kimmerer implores us to treat the earth and each other with reverence and reciprocity. She also offers deep knowledge of how respect, restraint, and resourcefulness are requirements for renewal and redemption.
And there you have it—the 5R requirements for renewal and redemption are reverence, reciprocity, respect, restraint, and resourcefulness.
Transcendent Kingdom gives us a haunting, horrifying, and heart-breaking glimpse into the lack of all 5R’s in our world.
In this brilliant second novel, Yaa Gyasi describes the effects of a family in isolation, the neuroscience of reward-seeking behavior, and how the two are intertwined.
The book follows a graduate student at Stanford and compares her relationship with her mother, brother, and father to a laboratory experiment with mice. Gyasi deals with the immigrant experience that pits her home experience against the outside world. Her writing is scientific, meticulous, and precise. It reflects deep knowledge of relationships with no room for fantasies about how the world works.
Her insights into how her brother’s opiate addiction mirrors the reward seeking behavior of mice rock you with their profound implications.
I walked away with a much deeper appreciation of how easily we fantasize our ability to control our environment, how ignorant we often are about the challenges people face, and how rapidly we can abandon our respect, restraint, and reciprocal obligations. And yes, Gyasi also exposes how quickly we blame others’ lack of resourcefulness and abandon any reverence we may have for others’ life and gifts.
Gyasi radiantly captures the rhythms of life and how the shadows of the past can darken the present.
She diligently relies more on evidence than anecdote to make her point.
She suggests that mental illness may not be an invention of the West, but it is experienced very differently in different cultures.
Gyasi does not pull any punches in exposing the cold-blooded nature of American racism.
Her description of how the American culture persuaded her highly gifted brother to shrink in stature as he walked through stores to avoid being accused once again of stealing should give all of us pause.
The transcendent kingdom to which Gyasi alludes is neither religious or scientific.
It is one in which women survive and thrive through reverence, reciprocity, respect, restraint and resourcefulness—one that women create by building a raft in a hostile environment and maintaining their deep connections to each other.
As I often do in this blog, I highly recommend these two books. And may I be so bold as to encourage you to read them with your new 5R glasses.
Now, let me get to the point.
When we cling to our ignorance and fantasies and don’t pay attention to the 5Rs, we are vulnerable to pitches and cons that appeal to our need for the 5S’s: Safety, Security, Structure, Stability, and Salary.
We are told that our safety comes from violent crackdowns on peaceful protests, that our security is enhanced by closed borders and bigger weapons, that our future depends on old structures, that our stability is enabled by keeping things the way they were, and that our salaries will be protected not by unions but by antiquated technologies. But the truth is that the 5Rs are the surest bet for accomplishing the 5S’s.
The only question is: “Are we willing to do the work the 5R’s demand?”
I worry that we are not only too attached to our ignorance and fantasies, but we are also too lazy and asleep to destroy our illusions and seek the truth.
As a current and compelling example, in the travesty surrounding the response to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s untimely death, we witnessed what happens when we exercise no restraint, pay no respect, offer no reciprocity, apply no reverence, and use no resourcefulness in finding a replacement for the Supreme Court who represents the majority of popular opinion on multiple issues.
My fear is that the current administration is counting on our ignorance and playing on our fantasies to maintain minority power over majority opinion.
My hope is that we will do the work required to be more reverent, respectful, reciprocal, restrained, and resourceful. May it be so.
It’s raining and the pavement is getting wet. No amount of ignorance or fantasy can change that reality. I hope we wake up in time to avoid sliding into the ditch.
There is still time for redemption and renewal if we are willing to meet the 5R requirements.
Here are some corollaries to Gurdjieff’s deceptively simple principle that the pavement gets wet when it rains:
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When the climate changes, whole species can go extinct
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When women don’t have the right to choose, deaths from abortion go up
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When kids don’t have access to equal education, many get left behind
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When the water is polluted, people get sick
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When people don’t have access to affordable health care, people die
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When truth has little value, lies substitute for truth
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When social media dominates your conversation, extremism thrives
A beautiful treatise my friend!
Great piece!! Thank you…
Great piece! Thank you…