Keeping the Work Warm
For full citations and meaning of abbreviations, see Introduction and Bibliography.
This post is a departure somewhat from my usual attempt to keep these writings within the sphere of medicine, hypnotism and consciousness in relation to Gurdjieff’s teaching, as reflection on practice seems necessary here too from time to time. One must, after all, try to consider this teaching as an organic whole, to avoid as much as possible “ ‘unbalancedness of mind’.”1
Maurice Nicoll talks several times in his Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky about the necessity of keeping the work warm in oneself. For example,
If one ceases to keep the Work warm and viable in oneself, if one lets it get cold too long, punishment comes. It takes the form of a cessation of meaning, of a deadness inside.2
One can also see this with life endeavours – if an interest, intense and abiding though it may be for a time, is not fed with attention and labour and love, then the inevitable mechanicality that begins to enter will have no opposition, it will lose its vitality and freshness and become a dead thing. To keep something warm in this context means to provide conditions to allow it to grow. The image of a bird sitting on its eggs, incubating them, comes to mind. There could be many other picturings, for example, with the image of fire. Tchekhovitch’s story from Gurdjieff of keeping the pot boiling in the context of work has been mentioned in another article.3
Nicoll also said,
...you must fight to have the Work in you. You must fight in your mind for the Work, to keep it alive, otherwise it begins to get cold.4
He warns of drifting without direction, and forgetting,5 saying that,
The Work depends on effort. It is based on effort but effort of a certain kind. First of all, effort is, in general, distinguished into two kinds, mechanical and conscious. In a general sense, mechanical effort is what we have to do, what life makes us do...
Conscious effort means effort that is not necessary in life and is not occasioned by life...6
The fourth way is a way of understanding. The fire of repeated renewal of understanding, rather than clinging to crystallised, dead forms, seems to be one very necessary aspect of this incubating of the precious egg of the work. Also the persistent struggle against identification and inner considering, against the tyranny of negative emotions, working with observing oneself, and efforts of trying to remember oneself.
This keeping the work warm in oneself affects the working of the centres, their interrelationship, and the experience of the passage of time, and thus the duration of existence.7 It affects the production of active elements by the organism. Nicoll devotes a chapter in his fifth Commentary to the subject of Mi 12,8 which is said to be produced from the food of impressions entering the organism as Do 48 when the process of self-remembering or the first conscious shock is taking place.9 He writes of saving energy, for example, by only external considering, and acting without identification, creating energy, especially for the emotional and sex centres:
If we could act consciously in every situation we would not internally consider. Internal considering sends us to sleep more than anything. It wastes energy. If we could externally consider only it would save energy. If we could act consciously in every situation we would create energy. To act consciously would mean to act without identifying. Identification leads to unconscious action. To act consciously in every situation would be to act without identification. To act without identification is one way to give oneself the First Conscious Shock. To give oneself the First Conscious Shock is to create energy. Two new energies are thereby formed in the human machine—the energy 24 at the early potential stage denoted by Re, and energy 12 at the note Mi. These two newly created energies appearing in the machine, by reason of the First Conscious Shock being given, strongly affect the working of the Emotional and Sex Centres respectively. The energies Fa 24 and Sol 12 are also created.
The fire from these energies or substances can be used for further work. The work is kept warm by continuing to make conscious effort in manifold ways. Only by keeping the work warm in oneself can there be change of being. Nicoll goes on to say that “without Mi 12 there is little change of being.”10 Thus, attempts to remember oneself are a key part of this keeping the work warm.
It is easy to deceive oneself and to fall and remain in a self-complacent mode, that can only be cured through the medicine of dissatisfaction with self. Again, from Nicoll, regarding attempts at self-remembering:
...if you are satisfied any attempt at Self-Remembering that you make will go to make you still more satisfied with yourself as you are. The adoration of this mess called oneself is the commonest and most binding and limited religion. ...Our very violence indeed provides us with material for Self-Remembering. We surely cannot remain satisfied with ourselves after slowly perceiving these unstable foundations of our ramshackle being...11
I must keep the thirst for being and consciousness alive. The wish for being nourishes the higher part and causes a loosening and melting away of attachments to useless and harmful things. Outer manifestation and practice, even though highly important, are not the primary concern. And apparent success or failure in our endeavours are not the main point either, but the inner attitude and right effort.
Is keeping the work warm in myself about motivation? Perhaps yes and no. Different motivations are bound to arise within me, but which do I nourish? Even when the feelings are like a desert, does the mind stay apart and remember the aim, the ideal? Do I keep digging, examining, questioning? Even, do I keep playing? Trying things out, with discrimination? For mistakes are also inevitable. But can I keep my sphere of activity, playing, exploring, within the realm of healthy, reversible mistakes?
There is also the need for the repeated coming back to the question,
...the question of why you do the Work. What is your reason? What is your end? ...Your aim or end, of course, changes as you understand more of the Work. ...how difficult it is to do anything in the Work from an absolutely pure motive and to avoid doing a thing “to be seen of men”.12
If you keep the work warm, you will keep yourself warm. Taking no thought for your life,13 makes life take thought of you – in the sense that the ordinary self, the personality and the animal part, find their corresponding place as servants, rather than the usual usurping of the role of director by a succession of upstarts of little “I’s.” Worry about life has no place here. One can compare the saying, “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”14 The fire is taken from the concerns of ordinary life, and devoted to the pursuit of consciousness and being. Either I direct my attention to keeping life warm or keeping the work warm. If the work is kept warm, and I value and love work for its own sake,15 life receives all that it needs. If I am absorbed in worries about keeping life warm, then the work will, sooner or later, become cold.
Nicoll spoke too of the force derived from meaning, and we return to what was mentioned at the beginning, of needing to keep in mind this teaching as an organic whole:
Meaning gives force and the more meaning this work has for you the more it will affect you emotionally and the more force will you obtain from it. For it is from the awakening of the emotional centre that the greatest force is derived.16
...we are speaking of the need for connecting any part or detail of this system with the whole meaning. In order to get force to work, what you do in working on yourself must have meaning and the more meaning the system conducts for you—that is, the more it means to you and the more the evaluation of it grows—the more force you will get from it. If you do not value it, if you like to doubt it, if you never really think about it, and do not try to see its significance more and more as time passes, by working along both the line of knowledge and the line of being, and so on, then whatever you do in connection with the work will have no meaning for you and so no force. You know that when anything has intense meaning for you it generates force in you, and if it has little or no meaning, then there is no force.17
In one sense, it could be that keeping the work warm in oneself is all about devoting love and attention to incubating “meaning eggs.”
...Yes, we sorely need to be born anew; and not of blood and flesh this time, but of Water and Spirit. That would mean another and quite new foundation: and so a New Man. The Work is all about this step.18
L p.86.
Nicoll – Commentaries, Vol. 5, p.1637.
Tchekhovitch, GML p.39, mentioned in The Fire of Consciousness.
Nicoll – Commentaries, Vol.1, p.95.
Nicoll – Commentaries, Vol.1, p.91.
Nicoll – Commentaries, Vol.1, p.91.
As self-remembering is so tied up with Iransamkeep, the regulator of associations – BT p.445.
Nicoll – Commentaries, Vol.5, p.1559-60.
See also ISM p.192.
Nicoll – Commentaries, Vol.5, p.1560.
Nicoll – Commentaries, Vol.5, p.1560.
Nicoll – Commentaries, Vol.5, p.1681.
As in the Gospel of Matthew 6:25.
The Gospel of Matthew 6:33.
As in MRM p.39.
Nicoll – Commentaries, Vol.1 p.31.
Nicoll – Commentaries, Vol.1 p.33.
Nicoll – Commentaries, Vol. 5, p.1560.
Ah, well done. More like this! From the heart of the work.