The first is Unnecessary Suffering. This would be the type of suffering that we incur because of our unreasonable attitudes and expectations towards others, from our ill-will, hatred and rejection of others, from doubt, possessiveness, arrogance and self pity. In other words, suffering arising from our self-importance.
The second is Unavoidable Suffering. This would be the type of suffering that comes to us by accident or from events beyond our control, such as interpersonal conflicts, war, disaster, disease or death.
Third, we have Voluntary Suffering. This would be the type of suffering that we take upon ourselves in order to accomplish a personal aim, such as an athlete who disciplines himself to win a race, or a student who labours to get good grades.
And finally we have Intentional Suffering. According to Bennett, this would be the kind of suffering that we take upon ourselves in order to accomplish an impersonal or altruistic goal, one that is directed more towards service to others or to the Work, and not for any personal gain. Bennett assumes that this is what Gurdjieff & Ouspensky meant by Intentional Suffering.
Ouspensky certainly seems to recognize the general necessity of suffering, as indicated by this remark from his book ‘In Search of the Miraculous’:
“To destroy suffering would mean, first, destroying a whole series of perceptions for which man exists, and second, the destruction of the ‘shock,’ that is to say, the force which alone can change the situation.” (In Search of the Miraculous, p. 308)
… That is to say, the idea of “destroying” suffering has a dual difficulty. On the one hand, suffering is something embedded in ourselves that we most struggle to let go of, in the sense that we grow attached to our suffering—we grow attached to our habits in such a way that we almost prefer to suffer as we do, and to our own detriment, of course. And yet, on the other hand, as much as we must rid ourselves of certain unnecessary sufferings, suffering alone is what can “shock” us, or “awaken” us to those very things that we must change about ourselves…
Below is a passage that I had to omit from my MA thesis. There simply was no room, and the passage proved redundant to the other text. But, the passage holds several kernals of truth & fully embodies the spirit of my work:
“You go into life according to the shape of your personality. You encounter life, people, and so on, through your personality, not directly. Is this clear? Now you do not see your personality. It is not conscious to you. So perhaps you blame life or people, or feel disappointed, and so on. The trouble is that you have acquired a certain mechanical device for making contact with life called personality that renders life to you according to its shape, as it were.
“And so here you are, always carrying about with you your personality, your apparatus for experiencing life, and always hoping perhaps, if you had a new environment, new people, a new house, new clothes, etc. that everything would be utterly different. How can that be? You are carrying about your apparatus for contacting life—that is, your personality. You may pack your bags and fill them with new clothes and go to the Anitpodes—but you carry your personality with you, with all its acquired habits of mind, habits of emotion, habits of behaviour, habits of talking, habits of finding fault, habits of movement, habits of health, and so on.
“Now this work is about how to get away from oneself, not from life. You do not get away from yourself by changing your outer scene. For this reason it is necessary to observe oneself and see what one’s personality is like and study it and see what one’s appartus is like. We all have all sorts of dreams about a new life—about ideal circumstances, marvelous people, etc. But such dreams are idle because even if we were placed in exceptional and beautiful conditions, such as are said to obtain in Paradise, we would react to them through our personalities and very soon be returned out as quite unsuitable, I fancy.
“The trouble really is that none of us knows how to live, because none of us sees that the trouble lies in the personality—that is, in the receptive-reactive machine we use to contact life. And we shall never learn how to live even a little aright if we do not work on personality in us, and see what it is in us in each case and what troubles arise from ourselves and not merely from others and from life.”
~(Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff & Ouspensky, Vol. 1, p.278
That’s a very good question, young Hamlet.
Before anything else, we encounter the question of ‘being’ verse
‘becoming,’ stemming originally from the Aristotelian problem of the
“One & the Many.” One can only ask: will we be forever what we be,
merely fortified and hardened by the test of time; is life just
recognizing our inflexibility; a learning to live with ourselves, per
se? Or conversely, is our selfhood subject to the nature of becoming,
a psychological progression of sorts; is there something to be said
for the possibility of a transcendental change, an (esoteric) (metaphysical)
evolution? How do we make sense of this paradoxical paradigm? A
leap. We must take a leap. With patience, I assert: “Becoming is our
savior.” Our promise. Our inspiriation to keep striving. And in
these ways, “to be” is stagnation, that is, to “not become”.
Hamlet, I answer: “Not to be.” Unless, of course, you tell me that
“being IS becoming”…. then how could I disagree? And therefore,
what follows is the largest, most tangible question one could ever ask:
“How shall I become?”