52: On the Virtue of Honest Labor and Physical Work

52

On the Virtue of Honest Labor and Physical Work

“I love those who love work.”

Gurdjieff

Driving home from Midland one Saturday morning last month where I had gone to pick up my weekend National Post and Globe and Mail I made my turn off Country Road 6 onto Concession 4 and noticed two workmen who were putting new shingles on the roof of the  empty building on that corner lot (which I’ve always felt would make a great location for a new Tim Hortons coffee outlet) standing on the ground taking a break, one smoking and one not, and something about them, the aura of their trade and the fresh fall morning with the oaks and maples at their most resplendent colors and the sun shining in the pale blue sky, I felt something that I hadn’t felt in a long while; I felt the deepest and saddest longing for the virtue of honest labor and physical work that my trade of drywall taping and house-painting always gave me, and especially long distance running which I used to do, a virtue that was so satisfying that I’ve decided to make it the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

My dictionary defines virtue as a noun, “a quality of doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong” (virtuousness, moral excellence). Virtue is also “any admirable quality or attribute” (merit, a work of great merit). Virtue is also “morality with respect to sexual relations” (chastity, sexual morality). Again, virtue is “a particular moral excellence.” But I am using the word virtue in the ultimate sense that Jesus used it when he said in Luke 8: 46, “Somebody hath touched me, for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me.”

A woman in the crowd had touched Jesus, believing that if she touched him she would be healed; and when she was found out, Jesus said to her: “Daughter, be of good comfort: thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace.”

This is the esoteric definition of virtue, and by esoteric I mean the secret meaning of virtue that specifically refers to that special kind of energy that one needs to nourish their soul, or inner self—the consciousness of their spiritual being, if you will.

Jesus was replete with virtue, and the woman’s belief in Jesus drew virtue out of him; that’s why he said that her faith had made her whole. But what did Jesus mean by saying that her faith had made her whole? What does it mean to be made whole?

This is the secret of Christ’s teaching of salvation, and not an easy secret to decode; but thanks to Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” I learned how to nourish my inner self and make myself whole too. This is the holistic benefit of honest labor and physical work that I managed to deduce after years of living the secret way, which simply means that I lived my life in that special way that resolved the consciousness of my non-being with my being and made the two into one, as Jesus promised. When Jesus was asked by someone when his kingdom would come, he replied: “When the two will be one, the outer like the inner, and the male with the female neither male nor female.”

By kingdom, Jesus meant personal salvation from the endless karmic process of being and becoming, resolving the conflict in one’s soul of one’s inner and outer self, or one’s being and non-being; and by learning how to make the two into one with the teachings of the secret way that Jesus taught, one can make oneself whole also.

That’s the metaphysics behind Jesus Christ’s teaching of salvation, but it takes a lot of hard work to realize one’s wholeness, that special kind of work that Gurdjieff called conscious effort and intentional suffering—the secret way of life that Carl Gustav Jung sniffed out in the arcane teachings of the ancient Gnostics and Alchemists (and later in Taoism, as he tells us in his commentary to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower) and which he applied to his own life with satisfactory results, as he was informed by a dream that he had a few short days before he died. In his dream he saw, “high up in a high place,” a boulder lit by the full sun. Carved into the illuminated boulder were the words, “Take this as a sign of the wholeness you have achieved and the singleness you have become.”

Like Gurdjieff, Carl Jung had also discovered the secret way of life and lived it; and this brings me to the theme of my spiritual musing—the virtue of honest labor and physical work. But because my understanding of virtue presupposes an esoteric knowledge that has taken most of my life to realize, I honestly don’t know how I can possibly distill my experience of virtue into a single musing; and so I’m going to call upon my transcendent function (my Muse) to assist me in my effort.

When I engage my transcendent function, I abandon to the integrative faculty of my creative unconscious, which I’ve learned to trust implicitly; and the first thought that came to me was, “God is merciful, and life is always fair.”

This took me by surprise; but the more I reflected upon this insight, the more I saw the wisdom behind it, and a poem by Gary Snyder came to mind:

REMOVING THE PLATE OF THE PUMP ON THE

HYDRAULIC SYSTEM OF THE BACKHOE

Through mud, fouled nuts, black grime

it opens, a gleam of spotless steel

machined-fit perfect

swirl of intake and output

relentless clarity

at the heart

of work.

          “Poetry is an act of the imagination that transforms reality into a deeper perception of what is,” said the poet Adrienne Rich; and it takes the genius of a poet to see the “relentless clarity at the heart of work” which I came to see as the virtue of honest labor and physical work; but, if this wasn’t clear enough for Gary Snyder, he offered another poem to help us better understand the experience of virtue and secret way of life:

AXE HANDLES

        One afternoon the last week in April

                                             Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet

                                             One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.

                                             He recalls the hatchet-head

                                             Without a handle, in the shop

                                             And go gets it, and wants it for his own.

                                             A broken-off axe handle behind the door

                                             Is long enough for a hatchet,

                                             We cut it to length and take it

                                             With the hatchet head

                                             And working hatchet, to the wood block.

                                             There I begin to shape the old handle

                                             With the hatchet, and the phrase

                                              First learned from Ezra Pound

                                              Rings in my ears!

                                              “When making an axe handle

                                                        the pattern is not far off.”

                                              And I say this to Kai

                                              “Look: We’ll shape the handle

                                              By checking the handle

                                              Out of the axe we cut with –”

                                              And he sees. And I hear it again:

                                              It’s from Lu Ji’s Wen Fu, fourth century

                                              A. D. “Essay on Literature”—in the

                                              Preface: “In making the handle

                                              Of an axe

                                              By cutting wood with an axe

                                              The model is indeed near at hand.”

                                              My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen

                                              Translated that and taught it years ago

                                              And I see: Pound was an axe

                                              And my son is a handle, soon

                                              To be shaping again, model

                                              And tool, craft of culture

                                              How we go on.

Gurdjieff was my axe, and his teaching of “work on oneself” helped shape me into my true self with conscious effort and intentional suffering, and so was Jesus my axe whose sayings and parables helped make my inner and outer self into one; but what does the poet mean by the “relentless clarity at the heart of work” that my intuitive self connected with God’s mercy and fairness of life? This is the mystery of the secret way…

Because I had no personal mentor in my life, I had to learn my trade of painting and drywall taping the hard way on my own, and I made more mistakes than I care to remember; but because I strove for excellence in my work, I began to appreciate excellence in every discipline, and soon I saw that excellence was the teleological goal of every facet of life. That’s when Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” began to make sense to me, because personal excellence was the goal of Gurdjieff’s teaching—which, in a word, was realizing my true self (as Gurdjieff liked to say, becoming a man without quotation marks); or, as Jesus would say, striving for personal excellence made the two into one and made me whole.

I’ve always had great respect for good tradesmen, and I’ve always had a special fondness for tradesmen who love and take pride in their work; something about them made me envious, and I had to find out what they had that made them special, because without exception the very best tradesmen who love and take pride in their work have an aura of authenticity about them that I simply had to call their personal virtue—an indescribable kind of “goodness” that makes them moral and whole; but the more I strove for excellence in my own trade of painting and drywall taping, the more I took on that same charismatic quality that I admired and respected and which I came to discern as the virtue of honest labor and physical work; but how to describe how I came to this realization?

When my creative unconscious offered me the insight that God is merciful and life is fair, I knew instantly what my intuitive self was telling me because I had long learned that life was the way to our true self and not religion or any special teaching, as such; all they did was facilitate the process of our becoming, and I made sure not to throw out the baby with the bathwater because every religion and teaching that I studied served its purpose. I was eclectic in my quest for my true self, but my trade of painting and drywall taping served me best because my work forced me to resolve my inner and outer self and authenticate my life; and this brings me to the virtue of honest labor and physical work because I needed all the virtue that I could get to make myself whole.

Gary Snyder saw “relentless clarity at the heart of work,” which I knew intuitively to be the pure virtue of one’s labor, a special kind of excellence and moral goodness that cannot be described but only experienced and which every person who loves their work understands without explanation; but because I learned how to “work” on myself with Gurdjieff’s teaching I began to see how the dynamics of making myself whole worked, and as mysterious as it may appear to be it is astonishingly clear in its simplicity.

This, then, is what my trade of painting and drywall taping taught me about the secret way of life that is inherent to all we do, if we but have the eyes to see which Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself” opened up for me: honest labor creates virtue, which we need to nourish our spiritual self to become whole; and by honest labor I mean doing one’s work with the moral integrity of honesty and ethics, which is hard to do in business because it’s much too easy to compromise oneself when one is struggling to make a living, but it’s out of the conflict of this struggle between our false and true self that we grow in our wholeness. As someone I read once put it, “all the growth is in the hassle.”

My trade of painting and drywall taping also taught me that physical labor creates virtue too (hiking, cycling, running, gardening, and raking leaves even), but it’s not as pure as the virtue of honest labor because the virtue of honest labor is inherently self-transcending and much more spiritually nutritious than the virtue of physical work. That’s why I felt that nostalgic feeling when I saw those two tradesmen taking a break from their work that morning; I longed for the virtue of my own trade.

But as I said, virtue has to be experienced to be understood; and I made a habit of being as honest and ethical in my trade as I could be (and how I hated myself whenever I screwed myself of the virtue of my work by compromising the integrity of my work and/or personal ethics); hence my book many years later Old Whore Life, Exploring the Shadow Side of Karma), and I also made a habit of doing physical work like long distance running every day because I needed all the virtue that I could get to satisfy my spiritual hunger for wholeness.

By making the effort to run seven miles every day after work I engaged myself in what Gurdjieff called conscious effort and intentional suffering (I didn’t have to run every day, but the holistic benefits were much too enticing for me not to), and the “goodness” that I experienced from every run cannot be explained because no one would believe me. The “guru of running,” Dr. George Sheehan who wrote Running & Being, tried to explain this “goodness” that he experienced with every run by exclaiming “In running I found my salvation!” But all he was saying was that running made him whole, and that’s the best that I can do to take the mystery out of the virtue of honest labor and physical work.

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