19: Gerbils of the Mind

19 

Gerbils of the Mind 

           “It’s all a pouring from the empty into the void,” said the mystic philosopher/teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff whenever he got tired of listening to people opine on life with the blind certainty of unprovable conviction, as intellectuals often do, which was exactly how I felt about the writer Colin Wilson as I listened to his interview with psychologist Jeffery Mishlove on his show Thinking Allowed; and an image came to me of a gerbil running round and round on the wheel of its cage but never getting anywhere.

Colin Wilson, who by this time in his life had written more than seventy books, brought to mind what Gurdjieff said to his student P. D. Ouspensky in his book In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching: “To speak the truth is the most difficult thing in the world; and one must study a great deal and for a long time in order to be able to speak the truth. The wish alone is not enough. To speak the truth one must know what the truth is and what a lie is, and first of all in oneself. And this nobody wants to know.”

But how can one tell the truth from a lie, and in one’s own mind? That’s the question that came to me as I listened to Colin Wilson, whose mind was so full of book knowledge that it was impossible to see behind the curtain of his formidable intellect, and I knew I had to do a musing to answer the question that came to me; but I have to call upon my Muse to assist my inquiry, and that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing…  

As with all of my spiritual musings, they come to me out of an evolving need to know; and as I reflected on this question—how can we tell the truth from a lie, and in our own mind?—I traced my need to know to the movie My Dinner with Andre that I “chanced” upon the Internet a month or so ago and which I had seen in 1981 when it first came out.

My Dinner with Andre fascinated me then, but a lot of water passed under the bridge in thirty-four years, and I felt compelled to watch it again just to see how it would affect me after all those years of life experience. I recognized Gurdjieff’s influence immediately on the animated New York theatre director Andre Gregory, the principle character in the movie, the other being the actor Wally Shawn, and Gurdjieff’s infectious philosophy was even more pronounced thirty-four years later; but with one noticeable difference: Andre no longer fascinated me. In fact, by the end of the movie all of his babbling irritated me.

I couldn’t get enough of Andre the first time I saw the movie, but as I listened to him talking to Wally Shawn over dinner thirty-four years later I saw that he was just another gerbil going round and round in the cage of his mind; and he disappointed me.

Gurdjieff founded his philosophy upon the premise that man goes through life in a state of hypnotic “waking sleep,” and with his teaching one could wake up to life and realize his full potential; that’s why Andre fascinated me the first time I saw My Dinner with Andre. So excited was Andre by his discovery of the possibility of waking up to life that his enthusiasm was infectious; that’s why My Dinner with Andre became a cult classic. But that’s all Andre’s talk was—infectious enthusiasm for self-knowledge, and nothing more.

I couldn’t see that the first time I saw My Dinner with Andre, because I was also infected by the Gurdjieffian “bug” to wake up to life; and I listened to Andrew’s fascinating story of self-discovery doing experimental theater deep in the forests of Poland, and exploring himself in the ecovillage of Findhorn in Scotland, and in Tibet and the Sahara with the rapt attention of a thirsty seeker—just as hundreds and thousands of life-weary souls hung upon Gurdjieff’s every word to quench their thirst for self-knowledge; but that would be a separate musing. Suffice for now to say that to wake up to life one has to step out of the cage of their own mind, which most people neither can nor want to do. And this brings me back to Colin Wilson, whom I discovered very early in my own quest for self-knowledge… 

“Today we’re going to be exploring the heights and the depths of consciousness,” began Jeffrey Mishlove on his show Thinking Allowed. “With me is one of the most prolific writers in the English language, Colin Wilson, author of over seventy books, including seventeen novels and numerous works in criminology, existential philosophy, psychology, religion, the occult, mysticism, wine, and music. Amongst his most well-known books are The Criminal History of Mankind, The Mind Parasites, The Philosopher’s Stone, Religion and the Rebel, The Occult, Mysteries, and of course his first book which became a world-wide best seller in 1956 when he was twenty-four years of age, The Outsider…”

I read The Outsider in my late teens and was hooked, and over the years I read a number of Wilson’s other books, one of my favorites being New Pathways in Psychology, but for reasons that I could not explain, Colin Wilson could not satisfy my need for self-knowledge, so I moved on to other writers; and decades later I had to listen to him on Thinking Allowed just to see how he had evolve, but even more than director/seeker Andre Gregory, Colin Wilson disappointed me—despite, or perhaps because of, the brilliance of his mind.

“Although you have written so much, you have described yourself as a person who has basically written on one theme your entire life,” Mishlove began, opening his interview.

“Yup,” replied Wilson, with a grin; “I’ve written the same book seventy times over.”

“And that is reconciling this issue of the heights of consciousness and the depths of despair,” continued Mishlove, and Wilson talked about his life-long study of how to reconcile these polar aspects of human nature that first seized his imagination as a young man when he read the Romantic poets Keats, Byron, and Shelly; and after writing seventy books on the mystifying subject of man’s enantiodromiac being/non-being nature, he was no closer to the answer than when he began his quest with The Outsider. But as brilliant as he was in his interview, which he spiced with quotations from a variety of eclectic writers, Colin Wilson proved to be no less boring than Andre Gregory in My Dinner with Andre.

The brilliant mind no longer dazzled me, because I had long since come to see that the brilliant mind is the seeker’s worst enemy. “The Mind is the great Slayer of the Real. Let the Disciple slay the Slayer,” said H. P. Blavatsky in The Voice of Silence, which was why I left university in my third year of philosophy studies.

I could not trust what the great minds had to say, because they cast me adrift in a sea of endless speculation; and there was Colin Wilson, one of the most inquisitive minds of our time still struggling to make sense of the human condition. Shaking my head in disbelief as I listened to him ramble on and on about his unresolved life, blissfully enjoying what he had to say like he was his own enraptured audience, I thought of Gurdjieff; and laughing to myself, I said, “It’s all a pouring from the empty into the void.”

Colin Wilson was just another gerbil of the mind going round and round in an endless circle of brilliant thought; but if he couldn’t reconcile the issue of the heights of consciousness and depths of despair, how does the gerbil free itself from its cage and find freedom?

Must take pause… 

Since I don’t believe in chance, when I hit a brick wall with my musing on the gerbils of the mind the guiding force of life came to my aid and led me to the movie Mindwalk on the Internet, which was another dialogue-driven movie modelled on My Dinner with Andre but only much more dialectical in its Socratic inquiry, and I had to watch it. I was fascinated by the three people of the dialogue—a disaffected physicist who has withdrawn from her professional life to ponder about life on an island monastery, the Abbey of Mount Saint-Michel in France; an American senator recoiling from his bid to be the presidential candidate for the Democratic party, and a disillusioned poet who moved from New York city to Paris to get away from it all and rethink his place in life; and when the movie ended I had the answer to the dilemma of the human condition that Colin Wilson could not answer.

Mindwalk was inspired by the physicist Fritjof Capra’s thought-provoking book The Turning Point, which I was familiar with, and the dialogue that the three actors—Liv Ullman, who played the physicist Sophie Hoffman; Sam Waterston, who played the American senator Jack Edwards; and John Heard, who played the poet Thomas Harriman—evolved into a dialectic on man and his relationship with himself, his fellow man, and the environment; and the Socratic resolution of their intensely personal philosophical inquiry was that man must take karmic responsibility for his actions, which was the only logical thing to do to save oneself and the world. A tall order, but dialectically sound—which was the same answer that I had arrived at in my own quest for self-knowledge.

I came upon my answer by way of Gurdjieff’s teaching that he simply called “the Work,” by which he meant “work” on oneself in a special way; and if one “worked” on oneself successfully he would realize his potential that the natural process of evolution could not complete—true to the Alchemist saying, “Man must complete the work that Nature cannot finish.” Which gives credence to another one of Gurdjieff’s sayings, “There is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life.”

By “working” on oneself in that special way (which would be a separate musing) one transcends the highs and lows of his enantiodromiac nature and resolves the issues of the human condition. This is why Mindwalk concluded with the only logically solution to man’s dilemma, that by taking karmic responsibility for one’s own life one sustains the integrity of the whole web of life; and this brings my spiritual musing full circle to the question of my inquiry: how can one tell the truth from a lie, and in one’s own mind?

As esoteric and difficult to understand as this may be, one cannot live one’s life with karmic responsibility and not become more conscious of how life works; and the more conscious one becomes of life, the more one can tell the truth from a lie. It’s axiomatic, because with karmic responsibility comes honesty; and the more honest one is with oneself and the world, the more discerning he will be.

 It’s absurdly simple, as all great truths usually are, but we can tell the truth from a lie by simply being honest. That’s why Mindwalk ended with the realization that the problems of the world cannot be solved in the ivory tower of one’s mind, as the disillusioned physicist Sophie Hoffman was trying to do like a cloistered intellectual on an island monastery, but by going out into the world and living one’s life with karmic responsibility.

 

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