Who We Admire
Any man can speak truly; but to speak with order, wisely, and competently, of that few men are capable. ~ Montaigne
There is something ridiculous about a learned man who lacks the discipline to use knowledge in a way that benefits his soul. Nor would we glorify the ignorant who move from action to action without consideration, without knowledge, and without any understanding of the consequences of their decisions.
If we look at the way our society measures a man, it is plain that we respect fame and wealth above other qualities. This happens even when fame has nothing to do with goodness or understanding and when wealth comes from inheritance or by taking advantage of others.
A man who measures a man by fame lacks his own judgment. He defers to others for his respect. His calculation must be that if so many other people like and respect a man, then he must have something worthy of admiration. He doesn’t examine the man by his own set of values, but sees that others value him and follows suit. We see this in the world of literature all the time. How many people know that Shakespeare is a great writer by their own judgment? How many people know firsthand that his poetry is unmatched? Or that he essentially created the complex, internally motivated character, or that his plays are masterpieces of stagecraft? If it hadn’t been for a small group of Shakespeare’s friends who pulled together the texts and published the first folio, we might know next to nothing of this great mind.
In our age, as in other ages, we value a good reputation and notoriety almost equally. Beauty and talent may be important factors, but merit is not often part of the equation. And nothing shows our disregard for merit and character more than our admiration of the wealthy for the sake of their wealth. Does that make him a good man, or even a good judge of character or events? Or does it show that he is a shrewd calculator of the weakness and ignorance of others and of the value of the goods he trades in?
Cicero thought that merchants should be considered vulgar because their profession required that they lie a great deal. Montaigne was more forgiving and believed that no profit is made except at the expense of others. In other words, that it is the way of nature, and we should not lose sleep over it.
The merchant does good business only by the extravagance of youth; the plowman by the high cost of grain; the architect by the ruin of houses, officers of justice by men’s lawsuits and quarrels; the very honor and function of ministers of religion derives from our death and vices. ~ Montaigne
The reality is that we admire the people who have what we want or what we imagine we want. We admire powerful and charismatic men because we want to control other people. Or we admire the wealthy because we imagine that a life of luxury will bring us new pleasures. We admire the young because their lives are not as limited as our own. And we admire beautiful people because we see that they are more eagerly admired.
Is it not even more ridiculous to admire a man because his father or grandfather made a lot of money? Do we also wish that we had different parents? The aim of democracy was to free us from the myth of admiration solely on the basis of ancestry. Instead, we have replaced our admiration for the well-born with an equally unfounded admiration for men born into wealth.
It is a rare man who admires another for his patience or for his capacity to suffer greatly without complaint, or a man, to use Shakespeare’s words:
Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled,
That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger
To sound what stops she please.
~ Hamlet
We dare not admire men of being who have changed themselves through effort and the transformation of suffering. Because that would mean that we would desire to bring on ourselves the necessity for the same effort and the same discipline and endurance. Instead, we prefer to imagine that fortune is going to hand us luxury, power, and pleasure. You cannot scan any list of new TV shows these days without finding a dozen or so whose main characters have developed miraculous powers, not by any effort of theirs, but by some accident or hereditary impossibility. The producers of these stories know what they are doing. They know that they will be more successful in pandering to the imagination of the public than in showing the realities of change of being.
Judgment
Judgment is a tool to use on all subjects, and comes in everywhere. ~ Montaigne
A man may have good judgment, poor judgment, or even no judgment at all. When I worked in a psychiatric hospital, the head nurse who hired me defined madness—our patients—in a very broad way. She said that insanity was the inability to live in or negotiate the outside world. Besides the rather broad sociological implications of this statement, it struck me that what she was saying was that our patients lacked a sound or clear judgment.
Judgment is what allows us to negotiate the world without injuring or insulting or confusing the people around us, and most of our patients had not managed to accomplish this. Our deluded patients confused their family and friends with visions of an alien world that they alone inhabited. Our depressed patients insulted or hurt their loved ones with snapshots of a world that was so overwhelming that it was not worth living in. Some criminal patients hurt others because they had no control over their greed or addiction or passion.
The problem with this definition is that in a world like the one where we now live, where men of power and influence suffer from serious and disturbing delusions themselves, it is harder for ordinary people to find models of good judgment. If they see successful people who prosper by bad judgment, why should they not imitate those people, after all, they have found success?
There is always a wider picture and that there are consequences to our judgments.
A man of poor judgment doesn’t see the consequences of his actions. A criminal who cheats and defrauds others had poor judgment from the beginning. Those who admire his skill at making money before he was exposed simply don’t have judgment far-reaching enough to include his inevitable fall. In the same way, the man who pollutes a river to profit in the short run also has poor judgment. He may seem to get away with it—even die before the crimes come to light. Yet he will suffer the consequences; if not in this life, then in another life or in worlds invisible to us.
The difficulty for us is that our judgment must be based on spiritual understanding, and not simply on cause and effect in the physical world. Part of what having a sound judgment means is an ability to see clearly.
So what are the building blocks of sound judgment?
First of all, I would say, is self-knowledge. If you do not know yourself and what is important to you, you will have no gauge to judge people and events. After that we must look to the three aspects of consciousness. Consciousness (or perception) provides the capacity to observe ourselves looking at the world. Without it, our judgments will be based on an imaginary self. We require will, because without some control over our vices, our judgments will be dictated by our weaknesses. And unity, because without it, our judgments will be sometimes sound and sometimes poor.
Fortune may beat us down—even in situations when our motivation is pure and our judgment is sound. Yet it is with our judgment that we assert our character and eventually the perception gained by our souls. It is essential and comes in everywhere because it informs our decisions.
Is Intelligence Really a Problem?
I cannot keep a record of my life by my actions. Fortune places them too low. I keep it by my thoughts. ~ Montaigne
The mind, like our other faculties, can be misused. Popular writers who emphasize the importance of being present see that thoughts interrupt this effort. But what they are observing is imagination or stray thoughts, not thinking. They find that the key to the practice of being present is a quiet mind. And they are right in their observation. Stopping thoughts is a powerful exercise in any spiritual practice. If practiced correctly, it will create fertile ground for understanding. And understanding, at its inception, is never in words. But to fix this, the mind must play its part.
It is not enough to count experiences, we must weigh and sort them; and we must have digested and distilled them, to extract from them the reasons and conclusions they contain. ~ Montaigne
Descartes was wrong when he said I think therefore I am. A better formulation would be: I am when I observe my thoughts Though thoughts could just as well be replaced with movements or emotions or sensations. It is observation or remembrance that creates being. All processes must have three forces to create results. The most effective triad for thinking is where observation the active force. The passive force, or material to be acted on, is the thoughts themselves. The third force is the motivation setting the process in motion, which could be the wish to learn, to communicate, or to understand.
The appearance of higher centers is a powerful and exhilarating experience. The question we have to ask ourselves is: do we want these experiences to become a part of being? Do we wish them to affect our life, even when higher centers are absent? In order to do this, we must learn to fix the understanding they bring.
And, in the Fourth Way, we don’t have to wait for the understanding of higher centers, but rather can learn to evoke that understanding. Imagine being able to bring the specific understanding you need to transform any situation, any negative emotion, or any suffering in the moment as it is happening. That is what we are aiming for. But if we are to accomplish this, we must infuse our being with the understanding as it comes to us. To do that, we need to begin to observe and organize our thoughts.
The role of the intellect is often descried. We can read in books that Gurdjieff was hard on Orage and Bennett and Ouspensky. But the evidence seems to suggest that Gurdjieff was, at times, hard on all his students. We happen to have more accounts of his interactions with intellectuals because they were the ones who were compelled to write accounts of his teaching.
It should be remembered that Gurdjieff called his group The Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Indeed, it is the very definition of the Fourth Way that we work on all our lower functions at the same time. It is a way of balance, in contrast to the three traditional ways which require intensive work in one center and to a large extent exclude the other two. We are all imbalanced, but the Fourth Way helps us in developing balance, not making us more intolerant and more limited.
The more a man understands, the greater will the results of his efforts. This is a fundamental principle of the fourth way. ~ Gurdjieff
Balance is always a more difficult path than extremity. Balance generally needs transformation and effort and understanding to come into being. Extreme ideas and actions are driven by passions and identifications. These tend to disappear in the face of higher centers.
If you want to gain our respect show us first that you can control yourself, and then tell us what you understand and what is important to you.
What I want now is to figure out a way to fix the understandings that I have worked so hard to realize. Every man, as he faces old age and death, must hope to take his understanding, and only his understanding, into the next world. It is that disembodied understanding that I defend when I ask: is intelligence really a handicap to spiritual work?
Any quality can be a handicap if we identify with it. Even health can be a handicap to spiritual work if we identify with it. Yet nobody is suggesting that we should neglect our health in order to do the work. A dancer may become expert in the movements, but if he thinks of himself as a dancer rather than as an observer of himself, this too is a denying force to inner work. And if an intellectual thinks of himself as an intellectual, rather than an observer of himself, it is a hindrance. At any rate, it does not help to demonize the lower functions. We should instead lay the blame where the fault lies, with the identification.
Stupidity, as Montaigne says plainly, is a bad quality, and to glorify it is worse. Balance is not sexy, and seldom newsworthy. Yet balance will get us to where we want to go. We are not three-brained beings by accident. The instinctive/moving function, the emotional function, and the intellectual function each provide us with a key to the understanding of higher consciousness.
Study and contemplation draw our soul out of us to some extent and keep it busy outside the body, which is a sort of apprenticeship and semblance of death. ~ Montaigne
We live in a world where a large portion of the population would rather hear a man speak nonsense with charisma and emotion, than to listen to a level-headed man speak the truth. If we were perfect, spiritual beings we would not need to work on developing balance. We would not need to form judgments. The world and other people would not be separate from us. We would see the world as it is and people as they are. Our soul would have the ability to encompass the being of the people around us and the entirety of the circumstances that affect us. Our judgment would be perfect and instantaneous. But since we are far from perfect, we need to employ our given faculties to negotiate the world and form judgments, and one of those faculties is the mind.
William Page is the author of the blog BePresentFirst.
This article is an excerpt from his longer article:
https://bepresentfirst.com/on-the-faculty-of-judgment/.
Other recent articles of his include:
https://fourthwaytoday.org/we-always-make-a-profit/ , https://fourthwaytoday.org/difficult-times/, https://fourthwaytoday.org/freedom-of-the-real/, https://fourthwaytoday.org/memory-and-higher-states/ and https://bepresentfirst.com/on-finding-oneself/