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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