The Search for Resolution
The need to be right
On one occasion Mr. Ouspensky was speaking of someone whom he described as a violent just man. He said, in so many words: “He believes that there are final solutions for everything. This makes him violent. He does not realize that everything is turning and changing, that we cannot do and that there are no final solutions. If there were, life would cease to be life. It would be death. You must understand that life is a perpetual motion machine. The same problems come round again and again and people try to solve them, to find final solutions to them, and no one can. How could they? We have to realize that the main life-problems are insoluble. There is only one solution to all problems and that is change of attitude.”
I said to him: “You mean that one must always start from oneself?” He said: “Yes, because you cannot change life, so why start from life, from the other person, and seek first to change him? But you can change yourself, and so change your reactions to life. Change of attitude changes the way life touches you. Attitudes connect us with outer things and make them important or unimportant, according to the kinds of attitudes we have been taught. So we get bound to unimportant things and take them as important—as if they were our whole life—and things that are really important we neglect.”
Maurice Nicoll, “On Finding Solutions” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 3, p. 979)
A Working Note follows for supporting subscribers, with a simple practical direction for inner work.
Working Note: For Today’s Inner Effort
Orientation: The passage points toward noticing the search for final solutions, and toward observing attitude in oneself.
What to Notice:
Today, notice moments when something in you wants to settle a matter completely.
An argument. A decision. A judgment about another person.
Notice the tightening in the body when you feel certain.
Notice the impulse to correct, to conclude, to finish the problem inwardly.
When someone behaves in a way you dislike, observe the immediate movement to change them in thought.
Observe the feeling that things should not be as they are.
A Small Effort:
Once today, when this impulse appears, pause before speaking or continuing the inner argument.
Sense the weight of the body.
Allow the situation to remain unresolved for a few seconds.
Shift attention from the other person to your own reaction.
Remain with the reaction without justifying it.
Remember: Life turns. Watch your attitude as it turns with it.