“In the philosophy of Georges Gurdjieff, the Five Obligonian Strivings are a list of particular things that a human being that is worthily on the path of becoming a true human being will take on.” Cynthia Bourgeault
“Believe it or not, the quality of your transformed work, your striving, your, your sincerity, your generosity of heart in being willing to offer yourself this way is indeed food for the angels. And never doubt it. It is received. It is noticed. So, the Obligonian strivings are a list of five particular things that a human being that is worthily on the path of becoming a true human being will take on.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 8:02 Final Teaching Day 5-audio.
The first striving: to have in one’s ordinary being-existence everything satisfying and really necessary for the planetary body.
“The first striving is to have in one’s ordinary being existence, everything satisfying and really necessary for the planetary body. Gurdjieff’s teaching was very, very clear that the entry to all the higher being bodies, if you want to call it that, is through the first body. The first body is our instrument in this life. And it’s perfectly well equipped to do everything it has to do, which includes being the womb of our second body. And just as you wouldn’t starve a woman in pregnancy, why starve a body whose real work is to nurture the growing finer beings, the Kesdjan body, the soul, the ones that really dance and have viability in other worlds.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 12:12 Final Teaching Day 5-audio.
The second striving: to have a constant and unflagging instinctive need to perfect oneself in the sense of Being.
“The second striving to have a constant and unflagging instinctive need to perfect oneself in the sense of Being. And this is a sort of triple enforcement to have a constant unflagging instinctive need to pursue being. In other words, to live in the world, but not of it, not to lose the main thread of the plot, that the main thread of the plot is not your next promotion or your next paycheck. It’s being, it’s being, it’s always, what is this perfection? We’ve talked about how real inner authority, authority comes from being. And not to lose sight in the hurly-burly of the fact that we are called to this path of radical transformation, and to prioritize it, and to somehow step into the tension that most of us experience in life between the near aim of making a living and keeping your family together, and the far aim of the perfection of being. And it feels like a clash, particularly if you’re trying to do this practice with a two-year-old and a five-year-old pulling on your skirts, while the 13-year-old is being busted for drugs and the 15-year-old is, you know how it goes in life. But these are the conditions, and it’s in the very, remember Gurdjieff is always talking about the struggling, the struggle between the two, and it’s in the way you stay present in the struggle that your particular path of transformation is going to emerge.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 17:39 Final Teaching Day 5-audio.
The third: the conscious striving to know more and more about the laws of world-creation and world maintenance.
“The third, the conscious striving to know ever more and more about the laws of world creation and world maintenance. In other words, cosmic intelligence. And to bring at things not just the force of emotional, you know, rhetoric or logic or wish or stamping your feet or reciting magic formulas, but to be able to step back and follow a whole process with compassion and impartiality so you actually see what’s going on. The premise is that basically everything that’s happening in the universe is unfolding under either the law of three, the law of seven, or their interaction. And there isn’t anything out there in the world which is transforming, evolving, or coming into being or passing out of being that can’t be understood in a larger context from within those perspectives. And so, the encouragement is not to be stupid. Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 19:50 Final Teaching Day 5-audio.
The fourth: the striving, from the beginning of one’s existence, to pay as quickly for one’s arising and individuality, in order to be free afterward to lighten as much as possible the sorrow of our Common Father.
“The fourth striving, the one that always brings me to tears, the striving from the beginning of one’s existence to pay as quickly as possible for one’s arising and individuality in order afterward to be free to lighten as much as possible the sorrow of our common father. And that one not only explicitly acknowledges that there is a cost of our arising and that we need to be mindful of that, but that the cost is ultimately born all the way back in the heart of God. And that the birth of somethingness out of nothingness was a messy birth. And it had to be that way if Jacob Boehme is right, because the only way you can get the whole ball rolling is to start in the dimension of pain. Boehme’s got a beautiful one liner that says pain is the ground of motion.
“And, you know that in your own life so often, it’s that devastating wound that finally kicks you out of the nest and gets you thinking about your life. If you were sitting there smug and comfortable, nothing changes. So we can ground truth that in our own being, but to think that the roots of consciousness, of sentiency, lie in anguish, makes you realize that not only individually in our lives, is there a price to be born, a debt to be paid, a suffering, but the suffering is born and shared in the heart of God. And it’s not just because humans screw up, which is the way we like to see it, you know, that God weeps because we’re such, you know, such headstrong children. There’s a dimension of truth to that for sure. But the truth of the situation is not exhausted in that. It’s not, if we all grew up and behaved, it still would not remove the sorrow because the sorrow is part of the conditions of the arising itself and is born by God in every breath in the commitment to re-arise. So it’s the willingness to step up and collectively, innocently bear some of that.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 28:27 Final Teaching Day 5-audio.
The fifth: the striving always to assist the most rapid perfecting of other beings, both those similar to oneself and those of other forms, up to the degree of the sacred “Martfotai,” that is, up to the degree of self-individuality.
“The fifth, the striving always to assist the most rapid perfecting of other beings, both those similar to oneself and those of other forms, up to the degree of the sacred Martfotai, that is up to the degree of self-individuality. This is the bodhisattva vow, basically. We’re not doing this work for our own private enlightenment. You don’t have a cubbyhole in heaven with your name on it and nobody else’s and your individual pin code. All in one, one in all, all for one, one for all.
“So, wherever you are, it’s the perfecting of helping others to perfect, to grow. And the others, remember he says, is up other forms, not just other human beings, but the perfection. This is how, this is where some of the ecological dimension comes in. Gurdjieff, in his whole image of the reciprocal maintenance, was probably one of the earliest ecologists of the 20th century. His real sense, even before Gaia theory got going, that the world and worlds was a harmonious breathing self-specifying system in which everything had parts to play. And the giving and receiving goes on through every, across every sort of layer and scale of humanity.
“This vow ties us, it’s the bodhisattva vow, but vastly extended in both directions to worlds beyond our own, to levels of being beyond our own, and also to life forms that are not human. And I swear you can also apply this even to what we callously call insentient forms. Mountains, streams, I mean, a lot of you grab rocks because you’ve experienced that rocks speak to you.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 33:00 Final Teaching Day 5-audio.
Annie Lou Staveley, in a short talk on the Obligolnian Strivings, passed along Jane Heap’s five words, “each of which gives a starting point to help in comprehending the five strivings: Health, Strength, Understanding, Duty, Service.” The Plan Is Good, p117
“It’s this inner observance of the vows—poverty, chastity, and obedience—in our own inner ordering that set the framework for moving out into our collective work. The we three vows that we’ve made—the first to my own individual work, the second to the work of the group, the third to the great work. And in all three areas, our work is due, and some kind of spiritual work works better in one category, some works better in another, but they’re all interpenetrated. So, in the first line of work, and the basis in Gurdjieff for putting these Obligonian strivings into practice was what he called conscious labor and intentional suffering.
“Conscious labor means the work to stay awake, to stay in three centers, to not let reactivity to the world throw you into autopilot, to hold the ground of something in you that’s seeing, that’s witnessing, that what Josh was talking about in the essay we read yesterday, to be able to live in a different mode of selfhood, that doesn’t have a dog in the fight all the time, and to be able to find refuge in that when you see yourself getting caught in your smaller reactive self, and to move back to that ground. That’s basically the groundwork that conscious labor covers. Intentional suffering has to do with taking on a piece of that burden that is not of your own making. Intentional suffering is not the same thing as stupid suffering when your false self program gets violated, and you get angry, and oh how I suffer.
“In the second line of work, the work with the group, which by means, of course, we mean our conscious transformation group, but groups that come together to magnify the effect of that second being striving, the aim for the raising of the being. In those groups, the work becomes cosmic dialysis and positive generation of the good. Cosmic dialysis is my own term that we know that the world is just filled with toxicity and craziness. You don’t have to be strong first to do this kind of work. You just have to be willing, okay? You have to get over the story that says you’re too fragile to do anything to help.
“The great work is to receive help from unknown hands. To support us in realms beyond our own, what feeds us, what we give back, our place in the great divine ecosystem, the whole system of mutual feeding, giving, and receiving that goes on beyond worlds. The great work is how God moves through this world, how the divine interpenetrates, interinfuses.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 38:21 Final Teaching Day 5-audio.
Logion 19
Yeshua says...
Blessed are all who come to live
at the point of arising--
their "genesis,"
before they came into temporality.
If you become my students,
listening deeply to my words,
even these stones will serve you.
And in paradise five evergreen trees await you.
They do not change in summer
nor shed their leaves in winter.
If you come to know them,
you will not know the taste of death.
Quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)
Page numbers for Annie Lou Staveley refer to The Plan is Good, (Two Rivers Press: 2023)
Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.
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