Work Day Theme: Life

We wish to be alive - really alive. We want to know life in all its expressions. Life that is creative, free, vital, strong, expressive, purposeful. That is why we are here today - because we want to live, to fulfill our purpose. 

Ordinarily we have an abstract idea of life. That it is a period of time in which a body is animated; or species of plants and animals-- "matter that has biological processes". We think of "my life" or "their life"; we think of it as a collection of experiences or state of affairs; that "life is good” or “ bad”. 

This is very different from a direct contact or experience with life. We have to see that we don't know what life is, that it is really a great mystery. 

With observation we see that life continuously flows through our organism. It flows through our instinctive part as vitality and the intelligence of physiology; through the sexual part as an aroused and generative impulse; through our spine and moving center as sensation and the intelligence of movement; through the head brain as perception, awareness and thought; through the plexus and emotional center as feeling. 

To know all of this as Life invites the need for a degree of freedom; to not be identified with the associations, with the contents, the forms and states, but to see life flowing through like water through a mill or electricity through a complex machine. Try instead to come in contact with the life that is flowing through you and around you.

During the day, today, when we wake up, when we remember, let us simply come in contact with life. Life in our own organism and life in the outer world, in plants, animals, and one another. 

Life in our bodies takes place in time. Gurdjieff says that every normal being wishes for immortality, for life beyond time. If this is a possibility we have to come into contact with Life outside of time.

Frank Crocitto aphorised "underscore what is" and the corollary principle "what you pay attention to grows". 

If we put our attention on a direct experience of life, that life will grow. 

In the long reading we will do today--"The Arousing of Thought"-- in three installments, Gurdjieff begins the book which he says has the purpose "to destroy mercilessly without any compromises whatsoever in the mentation and feelings of the reader the beliefs and views by centuries rooted in him about everything existing in the world."

This is an admonition to set aside what we think everything is, including life. For we can never really know anything as long as we have an idea, a placeholder concept, rather than direct contact. With contact we can be touched by life, and being touched opens the way for gratitude, reverence, and love to enter.

So today when you encounter an awareness of life in yourself, in plants, animals, people, or  even things, inwardly affirm our common Life. We don’t have this life. Life has us. 

Try to stay in contact but don't pursue that sense of life. Follow it. It's like trying to hear distant music. Listen carefully for the fine vibration of Life and let it guide you. Be an instrument for life.