By virtue of retrospection, I am able to detect the very moments in my day where I could have been virtuous, and failed to do so. Not to say that I was overridden with vice, but rather, I was unvirtuous, when a moment presented itself for virtuous action. These kinds of revelations hit me every so often, so I’ve decided to keep track.
Today I didn’t pick up an umbrella that I was sure a student left.
It began to rain on my way home, and had I saved her umbrella for another class, not only would she have had her umbrella, safe and sound, but I would have been dry for my walk home.
It seems that virtue always works both ways.
Blowin’ In the Wind
(Bob Dylan)
How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
Yes, and how many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly
Before they’re forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.
How many times must a woman look up
Before she can see the sky?
Yes, and how many ears must one woman have
Before she can hear people cry?
Yes, and how many deaths will it take til she knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.
How many years can a mountain exist
Before it’s washed to the sea?
Yes, and how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
Pretending he just doesn’t see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.
As it is, the ‘credit check’ is the best economic system we have.
We want money and investments in the hands of those that know how to use it wisely. Indeed, we tend to associate those who work extra hard to earn/manage their funds with those who will think more wisely when they spend it. The credit check holds one accountable to a standard of diligent effort and discipline (e.g., one must make many payments, and all must be paid timely). What’s more, the credit score check, in all its grace, cares not about the size of your charges, but the manner in which each charge is paid. In this way, it’s quite feasible to ‘work the system’, making small charges and timely payments.
In as much as there are some people who will never have the means to open an account— and this is a tragic injustice to say the least— there will always be some that have the means but lack the will to keep satisfactory accounts (i.e., they are too frivolous, or too negligent). Such are what Confucius calls ‘petty’ persons. Their credit worthiness will suffer and they will likely never have access to big financial opportunity, which comes with the borrowing and lending status of their more financially trustworthy societal counterparts, namely, those with high credit scores.
For this reason, there will always be classism in America…
…but we must not forget that the money and the spending/buying potential lies in the hands of the worthy and wise. Isn’t it implied (morally) that such a person should make additional consideration for even the petty lower class? At the very least mustn’t a man of high credit worthiness remember that some lower class are worthy but without means? I declare: Yes. And in his basic sentiment of human sympathy, and in his dream to improve all standards of living, he must strive to strike the balance between keeping and giving, between acquiring and providing, both in the currency of his pocketbook and the policy of his government. If a man should not make such considerations, then tragedy will prevail: corruption will run rampant and hunger will conquer the ‘worthy without means’.
At first glance, Ouspensky’s lectures (and Confucius too!) seem to encourage a classist outlook for society. Focusing on The Work of Ouspensky’s, you must remember that he is directly speaking to you in this moment! There is urgency in his tone. Classism is the way it is today. And you, myself, Malcom X, and others all hope to see that change; but today, there is classism. Categories of man are consituted in much the same fashion, predominately seperated by willingness and effort. If you want to affect change to the structure of society, this process of self-cultivation, of actualizing one’s own personal potential, is either necessary or catalytic for that to occur. Those who are strong in the Work are stong in life, and are strong in influence. This we must trust in, and if not, if your skepticism is too great, if you refuse to hear instruction and encouragement from the mouth of another, then, keeping in mind that these are mankind’s oldest teachings, I challenge you to try it… see for yourself the results of your efforts in the Work— if not for personal resolve, experiment in homage to humanity.
“What’s real?” asked the Rabbit one day. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you… you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Sometimes.” For he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at one, like being wound up, or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or who have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.”
-Margery Williams
“The Velveteen Rabbit”
In reading my new favorite book, ‘In Search of P.D. Ouspensky’: the genius in the shadow of Gurdjieff, by Gary Lachman, I’ve stumbled upon some incredible passages, especially in chaptetr 7. I’m just going to quote an integral chunk that sheds light on their relationship; some of the issues therein are quite contentious:
“… Gurdjieff seemed to know a lot about everything, and his answers to Ouspensky’s questions suggested that they stemmed from a system of some kind, a coherent, organized body of knowledge that Gurdjieff kept in the background, but nevertheless informed each of his increasingly facinating remarks. Gurdjieff also spoke of certain practical aspects to his work. His students, for example, were required to pay a thousand rubles a year — a considerable sum. When Ouspensky remarked that such an amount might be too dear for many people, Gurdjieff replied that those who found it difficult to pay such a sum would also find it difficult to pursue his work, and that people do not value something they do not pay for. His own time was too valuable to waste on people for whom it would do no good. Ouspensky accepted this, but Gurdjieff pressed the point, and Ouspensky found it odd that Gurdjieff seemed intent on convincing him of something about which he needed no convincing. Ouspensky knew that the kind of research he had engaged in required money (ie., such research involved many travels), and already the thought came to him that if he became more involved in Gurdjieff’s activities, he could more than likely help obtain the necessary funds. Even more important, he could bring to Gurdjieff a better type of student.
Without a word from Gurdjieff, Ouspensky was already writing himself into the story. Gurdjieff, he felt, had already accepted him as one of his students— he had not said so in so many words of course, but his intention was plain. Ouspensky was clearly pleased; but there was one problem: he had to return to St. Petersburg to prepare several books for publication. Gurdjieff replied that he often came to St. Petersburg and would let Ouspensky know the next time he planned to visit.
There was, however, one other consideration. Before everything else, Ouspensky was a writer, and he had to retain absolute freedom to choose what he would write about. On two other occassions he had had opportunities to join similar groups but had declined; if he joined them, he would have had to keep secret everything he learned. Ouspensky knew that, sooner or later, his discussions with Gurdjieff would touch on matters he himself had thought about and worked on independently (ie., in his first book, Tertium Organum and throughout all of his lectures)—- ideas of time, higher space, and other dimensions. He was sure that notions of this sort must play a part in Gurdjieff’s work.
To all of this Gurdjieff simply nodded.
“Well,” Ouspensky continued, “if we were now to talk under a pledge of secrecy, I should not know what I could write and what I could not write.”
Gurdjieff agreed to this, but added that too much talk was undesireable. Some things, he said, were only for disciples. He conceded, however, to the condition that Ouspensky could write about that which he understood fully.
Ouspensky asked if there were any other conditions.
Gurdjieff replied that there weren’t and added that in fact there could be no conditions at all, as the starting point of his work was that “man is not.” Man as he is, Gurdjieff told an increasingly astonished Ouspensky, is incapable of making agreements, of deciding anything for the future, of keeping promises and obligations. “Today he is one person and tomorrow another.” To keep promises and fulfill obligations, a man must first know himself, and he must be. “And a man such as all men are is very far from this,” Gurdjieff remarked. The reason for this, Gurdjieff told Ouspensky, is that all men are machines.
“Have you ever thought about the fact that all peoples themselves are machines?” he asked.
Familiar with the current trends in psychological thought, Ouspensky replied that yes, from the scientific point of view people are simply machines. But as he himself had argued in his writings, such a view leaves out the most important aspects of human existence— art, poetry, thought, all the phenomena of the fourth dimension. These, he replied, cannot be adequately explained by a strictly mechanical view of human beings.
Gurdjieff disagreed. “These activities,” he told a shocked Ouspensky, “are just as mechanical as everything else. Men are machines and nothing but mechanical actions can be expected of machines.”
Ouspensky was not entirely convinced. His whole drift had been towards discovering some means of resisting what he saw as the increasing mechanization of human life. Tertium Organum, the summation of his thought, argued in a variety of ways that love, art, poetry, ideas— all the things this mysterious Mr. Gurdjieff has just shrugged off— were powerful weapons in his philosophical arsenal. Now he was being told that they were just as mechanical as a pocket watch.
Conceding the point for the moment, Ouspensky asked if there were no people who were not machines.
“It may be that there are,” Gurdjieff replied. “You do not know them. That is what I want you to understand.”
“All the people you see, all the people you know, all the people you may get to know, are machines, actual machines working solely under the power of external influences.”
It was a powerful thought. Yet Ouspesnky still wasn’t convinced, and he found it strange that Gurdjieff was so insistent on this point. What he said was, in one sense, obvious; one had only to spend time in a large modern city like London, as Ouspensky had on his way back from the East, to see that life in such places was becoming more and more mechanical. It was clear that this was the ‘way of the future.’ At the same time, Ouspensky had always been suspicious of such all-embracing metaphors; they left out the differences which he knew were the most important things in life. It was precisely because the scientific view wiped out these differences that he fought against it. Why did Gurdjieff insist on an idea that was fruitful as long as it was not made too absolute?…”
end quote; (p. 99-102)
Is collapse really coming?
Are we running out of the resources
That keep our civilization running?
How will we live
When gasoline is no longer pumping,
When the machines we depend on we can no longer keep humming?
What will life look like
When there is no more value to paper money,
When the tragic irony of modern life no longer seems so funny?
How will we eat
Without depending on the superstructure of agri-business,
When we cannot create chemicals to try to neutralize our environmental mess?
What will we do
When we can no longer rely on a computer,
When we are unable to be a 50-miles-per-day commuter?
How will we stay warm
When the furnace pilot lights go out,
When we are at the mercy of a prolonged and indefinite natural gas drought?
How will we stay cool
When we cannot fire up an air conditioner,
When the pollution they emit makes the ozone layer even thinner?
Will the human species evolve to meet the challenges of the coming era?
Can we create a new lifestyle from the remains of the approaching terror?
It seems certain that the hardships ahead will be severe’
But the courageous and cooperative can help the human race persevere.
With every passing moment the titanic crisis we’ve created draws nearer’
So let us get our acts together before that fatal time is finally here.
By: Eric Hoffman
It’s been a long time since I’ve allowed myself to feel deep frustration, but today, I can’t help it. I’m consumed. I’m identified. I’m sad.
Every once in a while all of the things on the plate pile up, and suddenly you’re left in your own tiny little corner, with your own tiny little cloud overhead, and it dumps on your tiny little self. No one can every really understand the pain and stake you put into you efforts. No one can ever truly empathize with all of the things you (claim to) juggle in your life. Any shoulder you were to lean on can never truly know the specifics… the specifics of how it all fell apart, of which piece of hay broke your back, but a good shoulder might listen. That’s true. But even then, it doesn’t make it easy to speak.
Today I let myself down. For the first time in a long while. In the grander sense of it all, I know that many of my deadlines and activities are abitrary; but in my little world, as a twenty-five year old graduate student of philosophy, I had hoped to absolve myself of my petty habit of underachieving. Even with no ultimate anymore, I admit that I’ve got a lot on my plate again, but I’m pretty sick of my own excuses. Everything can be justified. The mind is a wonderful tool in this regard. But the truth of it all is that we set out to do things because we believe that we can achieve them. Either my eyes are too big for my abilities, or I’m making mistakes throughout the process.
I’m starting to realize (with some precision) the full extent of my character flaws. Often I don’t think enough before I make my commitments. Often I think I can use time more efficiently that I actually do. Often I think I’ll remember what I quickly forget. Often I take other people for granted, especially those I love, and worse, those that I know love me. Often I fail to do the things that mean the most me. Often I interupt my own schedule to accommodate the spontaneity of others. Often I get little sleep. Often I need more help then I’m willing to ask for. Often I’d rather work harder than ask someone to compromise with me. Often I do little to overcome each of these deficiencies. Yes, on the one hand, it’s important to make such valuable self-observations, but like Ivan Osokin, I’ve quickly come to repeat my errors over, and over, and over again, ad infinitum. What good does it do to declare once more: “The buck stops here!”.
Truth be told, I’ll fail again.
(I just hope my next failure doesn’t blind-side me like today; I’d rather a gamble where I’m more aware of the risk).
I’ve often referred to my college years as a rebellion against a kind of tyrannical rule over my adolescent social life, more specifically, over my ability to entertain my closest teenage friends and loved ones. I’ve since taken nearly every opportunity to give and share and be in the interests of my social world. But I won’t allow myself to be a product of my past. These old habits are of my own creation, and they are meant to be overcome. As I slowly slip deeper and deeper into the grip of academia (which is of my choosing, remind you), I realize my ability to maintain an extensive social equilibrium is a delicate and near impossible possibility. But here’s the best part: I know this! And I’ve spent the last 7 days in near isolation, working and grinding— a true slave to the pen. I even let Halloween pass me by as just another weekend. And it felt quite good to not participate in such a cultural charm. But my efforts were not good enough. TA‘ing four 25-person biology discussions, taking two courses whch total 6 papers and two presentations, writing two thesis chapters of 25 pages each, leading a weekly reading group and working 25 hours a week at the corner market might just demand a bit more discipline from me if I’m going to complete this program unscathed by March.
Here’s a taste of the week: Hume Paper due Monday. Confucius Paper due Wednesday. Thesis chapter due Friday. Hume Paper due next Monday. Confucius Presentation next Wednesday. Grade 100 papers next Friday. Next Saturday: Drink all night…
The stakes are newer and higher than ever before. My ability to perform is all that people can judge. No one has time for your juggling act. They want results. I understand this. Yes, I know that progress was built on struggle.
But today I turned in a shitty, incomplete paper on Confucian Ritual, and I somehow ripped my favorite pair of sweatpants on the chair as I stood up to retrieve the paper from the printer. So, Today, I’m frustrated.
Already naked
But still trying to hide,
I fearfully perpetuate
A living suicide.
Running away
But really running in place,
I assume false identities
Instead of facing my
Original Face.
Never satisfied
And continually searching
For something better,
I could waste my time seeking
‘One more’ forever.
These are the inborn tendencies
That I must work to overcome,
And when I am finally fully authentic
The first part of my job will be done.
Then I will really be able to create the future
And for all of the right reasons
At all times
In all places
Regardless of changes in weather
Or the turning of the
Seasons.
By: Eric Hoffman