The fundamental effort

Today, I would like to invite you to explore and become clear about the effort and the work that we are undertaking. The fundamental effort is to come to be. This can be understood if you understand the fundamental problem of most is they are not yet. They haven’t come into existence, so to say, but this is rather tricky to be understood because most people feel they already are.

In the view of Gurdjieff, he would say, man is not born with a soul, he can give birth to one. It helps us to grasp this discussion.

So the first and fundamental effort is for one to come into being, to exist ... ‘I am’. For now, what most people are is nothing but a reflected reality, an experience accumulated, a sensation, a thought. If someone has gone through something in their life, based on that experience, the experience they experienced as themselves lives as them. They are not yet. The result of the absence of existing, one can never act. One is simply a victim of everything around, one simply lives out the biological reaction ... the innate intelligence that one is, never comes into being.

Then life is a chance, life is an accident; life is not a deliberate participation or a creation. If you have ever been by a beach and you see a coconut floating; they sometimes have crossed continents ... Coconuts are very interesting things; they’ll land up where they land up, where the tide lands them. Nothing is deliberate, almost everything is accidental.

So almost everything people are is an accidental outcome. What you are, what I am, may be just accidental, nothing is deliberate. I’m happy because something happened, I’m sad because something else happened.

So today, I want us to explore the work. The mental idea that you are born in this country, you are this nationality, this race ... that is accidental, that is by default. Then we are merely adjusting labels, we are not.

The beauty of coming into being, it’s almost despite you ... it’s almost despite what has happened to you. So the excuse of my childhood, the excuse of my experiences forming me are rejected. I am happy, I am loving, I am giving despite ... not because. The way Master likes to coin it, I will say, beyond the reflected state. I was born in a small fishing village, that was my environment, despite that. So in another sense, I don’t allow what has happened, my circumstances, my condition to limit me only to be that, I can wake beyond it. Then I am.

If you follow this inquiry, you will very quickly come to see almost everything everybody is, is circumstantial. It’s an effect and we become addicted to effects. Now we are looking for the effect, predicting that this effect will make me happy.

The chocolate becomes a great lure; I’m not only eating it for the nutritional value, I can predict the experience I will feel and I identify that experience as me. Is there anything wrong with it? I don’t think so if the chocolate is of good quality but to be a victim to that is a problem.

The fundamental effort that Master is undertaking with all of you is to birth you. In Sanskrit, they call it twice-born. One is the biological birth, the next is the birth of you. Despite being a man, a human with jealousy, anger, violence, sex, possessiveness, selfishness; being able to exist in a decent state would be the action of birthing me, despite me.

So if you observe, if you study and if you watch you, your glory is despite what is there. If a man is selfless, it is despite him, you know, because the system thinks being selfless, it’s going to die because it wants to be selfish, it wants to survive. In the Buddhist tradition, they will use the lotus as a symbol. Despite the mud ... the lotus flower doesn’t bloom in a very grand place, it blooms in stagnate water. They use the lotus as a symbology, the birth of me.

One of the signs of the birth of oneself is you are able to create. Your condition does not determine the creation you will live out. Despite ... would be one of the ways to look at this.

So the eagerness for a better life, for a better world, even though there is an evolutionary reason behind it but one of the key reasons is I’m attempting to birth me. I am despite ...

It’s like how Master constantly tells the people who love me, “You love me despite me, not because of me.” You understand? If you ever understand the science of love, if somebody loves you, it’s despite you. If somebody says it is because of them, they’re lying because love is not a possibility, it’s not a natural outcome of a human, it’s despite his animalistic state he rises to love. So it’s despite ...

So today, I want to draw your attention to the effort we are undertaking. We are not in the woo-woo business or feel-good business. We recognise the desperate need to birth oneself and if I can persuade you to look at it that way, that our very existence and every trauma, every trouble we go through is nothing but a provocation to birth ourselves. Once I birth me, what happens? I can dictate the creation I live out, I become the lotus.

Like, from poverty somebody becomes rather wealthy, even though it’s a normal evolution, but it’s despite ... He’s conditioned to be poor, he’s born poor, his instinct is survival. Despite that to think about wealth, growth and the rest of it ... it’s despite. They say Buddha became enlightened despite the instinct of a king, despite his drive to conquer, to rule.

In order to grasp this deeper, if you really look at people, they are not there, nobody is there. Just a pure reaction is there, just the evolutionary impulse is there, that’s all that is there. If one looks at a pretty girl, the natural impulse unfolds and the doctor will call you healthy. I might declare you sick, but it’s just a point of argument. It’s not that the impulse is not there, despite the impulse, what do I do?