This morning I watched the film ‘Meetings with Remarkable Men’ - The story of G.I. Gurdjieff and his travels to achieve enlightenment and inner growth. Beginning with his childhood, the movie follows his journeys through Central Asia as he discovers new levels of spirituality through music, dance and near-encounters with death.
This made me think of my extraordinary life that I share with my husband, our esoteric experiences that have led us ultimately to a place where we can choose to live as an isolated couple, sharing our findings, exploring new ideas and growing and expanding our understanding of the things that have shaped our worlds – it’s inner world only as the outer world is a platform of meeting places and shadows.
We have shared these illuminations over eighteen years, never sure of our footing, always one step away from possible destruction and somehow, with unseen help, have managed to stay the path thus far.
What this film revealed to me is that what Gurdjieff experienced is virtually impossible in this Western way of life unless your mind is open to all possible experiences and incredible meetings with the unknown. It is hard to think that every meeting is a possible enlightenment, every walk in this earth could mean discovering the impossible and that at any given point you may not return the same person that set out on that walk.
It seemed to me that in my life, places where ‘I had to be’ would be great times for encounters, and in some ways I miss those opportunities of interaction, in the launderette, in the room where I used to teach at my local school and in the various shops that I used to be in charge of. When you ‘have’ to be somewhere you find that people come to you, sometimes for you to help them and sometimes for you to be helped. You have made that space available in your mind. I am going to be in this room teaching for the next 4 hours, this is my magical space, a space for events and who knows what will happen. I also have to risk losing my life at this point as I am at the certain mercy of this space, I don’t necessarily mean literally… But yet why not?
What is this life, this consciousness that we experience. I am ever more convinced that this reality is an illusion and that our real life is in the ‘dreaming time’ and maybe that we even exist in a parallel reality.
So where do I exist now? My life has led me to a small island in the North Sea where most of the Winter, the weather keeps you indoors, forcing you to look inward at what you really are, what you really feel and what you need to understand and become. This my cell. And it seems that I shall live here and become, until the time comes to leave, to maybe go back to a place where there are more people and learn from those experiences. Or maybe this is where I shall stay for the rest of my years where the only regularity in my life is the postman who ties me back to a ‘normal existence’ and creating or rearranging jewellery which I love doing. Music is elusive and now on a different level after watching Wagners Ring Cycle and my attempts at creating or playing my own music is not yet in the right place, most of the time I feel frustrated at my attempts because something is missing. Once I find it – who knows what I could do?
What I do know is that without the space and time to explore my inner self nothing will happen. If I fill my life with TV, with worrying about what others think of me and trying to fit in with society then I am doomed to stagnation and when I have died, to ever returning to this earth to keep learning until I make the breakthrough in understanding and truth.
I am ever learning – it is hard work but joyful work nonetheless.
Thank Goodness for remarkable men and women to guide us.
