The Reality of Being
Jeanne de Salzmann, also known as Madame de Salzmann, was a practitioner of the Fourth Way, an approach to self-development created by Russian mystic, philosopher, composer, and spiritual teacher of Greek and Armenian descent, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. G.I. Gurdjieff taught that most humans live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep,” and he described a method—calling it “the Work” or “the System”—for achieving a higher state of consciousness. Uniting the methods of the fakir, monk, and yogi (whose paths to awakening focus on the body, emotions, and mind, respectively), he also called it the Fourth Way.
Madame de Salzmann became a close pupil of Gurdjieff’s after being introduced to him in 1919, by Thomas de Hartmann, who’d met Gurdjieff three years prior and from 1917 to 1929 remained his student and confidant. De Hartmann was already an acclaimed composer in Russia when he met Gurdjieff in St. Petersburg, and would go on to transcribe and co-write much of the music that Gurdjieff collected and used for his movements exercises, a series of sacred dances that comprised part of the Fourth Way work. I don’t know why de Hartmann didn’t continue working closely with Gurdjieff past 1929, but de Salzmann did. Having studied piano at the Conservatory of Geneva, she’d also taught dance, so in her thirty years of working with Gurdjieff, she was responsible for transmitting the movements exercises. She also conveyed his other teachings through the Gurdjieff Institute of Paris, the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York City, the Gurdjieff Society in London and the Fundación Gurdjieff of Caracas, as well as other formal and informal groups throughout the world. Many of Gurdjieff’s other pupils recognized de Salzmann as his deputy. She led the Gurdjieff Institute of Paris and continued to disseminate his teachings, per his request, after he died in 1949. Jeanne de Salzmann herself died in 1990, at the age of one hundred and one.
The Reality of Being was published posthumously in 2010. Edited by a small group of her family and followers, the book’s entire contents were taken from de Salzmann’s personal journals, which she kept for forty years. I’m a big fan of diaries and journals. They are not only historical treasures, but in many cases, psychological, emotional, and spiritual portals into other humans. Why anyone would not be a fan of them is beyond me. If viewed as a kind of technology (and it is largely a way of remembering), diaries and journals accomplish something that none of our high-tech gadgets have yet accomplished and hopefully never will: they enable us to quite literally read someone else’s thoughts. And in the case of Madame de Salzmann, those thoughts are profound.
This blog post is the second one in which I’ve reflected on ideas from a posthumously published journal—the first being on Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius. Both books explore the nature of existence. Both contain some of the purest spiritual insights you’ll ever read. Both are repetitive, in the way of an almost musical refrain, the same ideas expressed with slight variation so that we the reader might see it from all possible angles, and understand it a little more each time. But whereas Meditations moves back and forth between note-to-self like statements in the second person (addressing himself as “you” instead of “I”), The Reality of Being is written entirely in the more common style of journals, the first-person, and for that reason it feels much more intimate than its second century predecessor. While Marcus says, “Life is short. Get what you can from the present,” de Salzmann says, “In order to be present, I must see that I am asleep.” While Marcus says, “Be satisfied if you can live the rest of your life, however short, as your nature demands,” Madame says, “I need to recognize that I can understand nothing if I cannot remember myself.” Marcus says, “Your three components: body, mind, breath. Two are yours in trust; to the third alone you have clear title.” Madame says, “I need to see that what is lacking is a connection with my body.” Their voices are clearly different in other ways aside from point of view (first-person or second), but to explore those further would exceed the scope of this blog post.
My focus for this post will be the first four chapters of The Reality of Being, which equates to its first one hundred pages. (There are 292 total.) According to the book’s foreword, most of the material in chapters one through four originated from the first decade after Gurdjieff’s death. Their titles are (1) A Call to Consciousness, (2) Opening to Presence, (3) In a Common Direction, and (4) The Work to Be Present. To try and do a post on the entire book would’ve been exhausting. While I thoroughly enjoyed reading the first hundred pages of The Reality of Being, I was ready to take a break and just sit with their ideas before consuming more.
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I’m going to take the same approach to reflecting on the book The Reality of Being as I did to reflecting on the book Be Here Now, in that I’m not going to follow the order in which the book was written, but my own interest and fascination with a handful of its ideas. The first that comes to mind is the notion of the “ordinary ‘I’”—and of course that’s the pronoun “I,” not the ocular organ. Another word for the ordinary “I” is “ego.” De Salzmann says the ego is located in the mind, where it engages in a “perpetual battle” to find security, which it does by identifying with certain images, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences. “My usual consciousness,” she says, "consists entirely in judging—in accepting or refusing. This is not real consciousness. Indeed, in this state, without a quiet mind, nothing real can be revealed to me.” Like J. Krishnamurti (whose book The Awakening of Intelligence was the focus of an earlier blog post) de Salzmann says again and again that the thinking mind, of which the ego is a part, cannot create anything new. She says its function is “to situate and explain, but not to experience.” It only organizes experience into already-known categories. When the mind is quiet, it can entertain new things, but the moment that thinking happens, new becomes old. What we call knowledge is just an accumulation of associations and images. This is the concept we must grasp if we are to be truly present. In other words, we must understand how the thinking mind works.
De Salzmann says that until we have this understanding, we are prisoners. She calls herself “a prisoner of all the impressions deposited in me.” She is beholden to her conditioning—to memory, to external influences, to information. A mind that is nothing more than a reservoir of information is weak and lifeless. She was writing this in the 1950s, when our species had technically just entered into the Information Age but really hadn’t seen nothin’ yet. Now, thanks to the internet, too much information has become our modus operandi. We think it makes us smarter, when all it does is make us more informed. And intelligence—at least according to de Salzmann (and, it bears repeating, Krishnamurti)—has little or nothing to do with information.
In light of this concept, it’s interesting to consider how we approach education in this society. We send our children to school so they can learn what they “need to know” in order to function in the world we’ve created. We send them to school, that is, in order to perpetuate the world we’ve created, which is essentially a world that doesn’t give a damn about them. For decades now if not centuries, each new generation of children is one to whom all former generations have essentially said, and continue to say through our way of living, “You don’t matter. We don’t care if you have clean air to breathe or water to drink or nutritious food to eat or healthy soil in which to grow that food. We don’t care if your life is short and brutal due to fires, floods, hurricanes, nuclear war, mass shootings, and other disasters. And we sure as hell don’t care what you want to learn, based on your own natural interests, which, if we could just allow you to follow, might be the only thing that could truly make this world a better place.” I for one at least believe that the world wouldn’t be nearly as horrific a place to inhabit if we truly prioritized our children. But instead we prioritize our economy. And we send our children into classrooms for the majority of their young lives so they can acquire information, and we act like we’re doing them a favor, when really we’re just conditioning them to put up with jobs they hate because they’re used to doing things they don’t really want to do.
Of course, I realize that some children genuinely like school, and that there are many teachers out there who genuinely love children, and these teachers do what they can to honor a child’s natural interests. But in most school settings, teachers are severely limited in this regard, by the confines of the system, and by the fact that there’s only one of them and fifteen to twenty students. We say it takes a village to raise a child but given our teacher-student ratios we clearly don’t believe that…
Anyway: another person who seems to share Madame de Salzmann’s perspective on the role—or lack thereof—that information plays in intelligence, is Wendell Berry, whom I’m going to discuss in my next blog post. In his essay, “Two Minds,” Berry discusses the Rational Mind and the Sympathetic Mind, positing that we humans need to operate from more of the latter and less from the former. The Rational Mind takes great pride, he says, in its ability to make “informed decisions.” The more information we have, the better decisions we’ll make. But the industrialization and centralization of agriculture is the product of informed decisions, as are nuclear power plants and a slew of other systems and inventions that will likely result in our destruction, or at least in the destruction of a great many of us. Wendell Berry famously does not own a computer, and in my opinion he’s among the most intelligent people alive today. And of course we’re seeing that one very dangerous result of owning a computer and thereby having access to so much information, is that the information becomes meaningless. Or rather, we just make up information and for no good reason claim that it’s true, or we do the opposite, claiming for no good reason that the truth is a lie. And in the final analysis, where decision-making is concerned, the importance of information might pale in comparison to that of basic self-knowledge. Kristine Kaoverii Weber, founder of Subtle Yoga and head instructor of the yoga teacher training I did in 2018, says that knowing how we really feel—and therefore who we really are—is key to knowing how to act. But she’s talking about feeling on a much more subtle level than most of us are used to. Most of us are used to only recognizing feelings when they’re very strong, and then we seemingly have no choice but to react. These feelings are so strong that they feel like truth; we believe that we know what the truth is.
But de Salzmann says, “If I recognize with all of myself that ‘I do not know’…I become free of my conditioning…and can have a direct perception of what is beyond it.” Now we’re back at the notion of getting beyond conditioning, which as I’ve said before is my favorite definition of spirituality. De Salzmann isn’t saying, though, that we should always be directly perceiving what is beyond our conditioning. And this is something I find to be refreshing about her book. She circles around and around the notion that we as humans inhabit a liminal realm between a higher and a lower plane, or what she calls, respectively, the source and life, or you might say the spiritual and the material. She says, “I have to know that I have a double nature, that there are two forces in me: the descending force of manifestation and an ascending force returning to the source. I have to experience them here at the same time in order to know myself as a whole.” She goes on to say—and I italicized this in my notes—“There must be some reason why I am here, something that is needed for a relation between the two.” I love the idea that the reason we as humans are here is to join the high and the low, to unite the form and the formless, or at least put them in conversation with each other.
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One way to foster the aforementioned conversation between one’s material and spiritual selves is by cultivating a more intimate relationship with one’s body. Most people live from the neck up. This is how we’ve been conditioned to live—always in our heads. But emotions happen in the body, and we must be able to (a) feel them in a conscious way and (b) respond to them within ourselves if we wish to reduce our knee-jerk, reactionary behavior and make decisions that are truly informed—not by the external world, but by our own internal ones. Which isn’t to say we should never take the external world into account. But I’m convinced that our emotions are running the show most of the time, both in our more intimate interpersonal relationships and in larger intra-national and international conflicts. These conflicts are fueled by the belief that someone else is or should be responsible for how we feel, and we will only feel better if they change their behavior or otherwise give us what we want. Meanwhile we’re not actually looking at our own emotions, not really interacting with them. And the result is that we don’t really know ourselves. And when we don’t know who we really are, we identify with other things, like political parties. Like guns.
De Salzmann says, “I need to see that what is lacking is a connection with my body. Without a connection I am caught in thoughts or changing emotions that give way to fantasy. And my body is either my master, a tyrant demanding satisfaction of its appetites, or my enemy, obliged to pay for all my thoughts and feelings.” In that latter bit she addresses the opposite side of the coin I was just talking about. One way some of us have found to “make the body pay” is through eating disorders or excessive exercise, which essentially serve to numb strong emotions. Another way is through substance abuse. But as de Salzmann says, our bodies could be our greatest support for experiencing existence. She says that the body is “on the level of earth and draws its strength from it. The action of our life is on this level, this sphere, not somewhere up in the air. I have to feel the body on the earth, the ground. I do this by sensation—sensing its weight, its mass, and, more important, sensing that there is a force inside, an energy. Through sensation I need to feel a connection with my body so deep it becomes like a communion.”
Enter yoga. Or tai chi. Or chi gong. Or the Feldenkrais Method. Or the movements exercises—also called sacred dances—that de Salzmann practiced and helped facilitate as a teacher and student of the Fourth Way. Whatever works for you as a technique for inhabiting your body more fully on a regular basis, please do it. Some days this might just look like rolling around on the floor and stretching what feels good to stretch. Every day it can look like simply checking in with what we’re experiencing on a sensation level as we go about our usual business. I often notice that I’m holding my breath or just breathing very shallowly; that my jaw is clenched; my brow is furrowed; my shoulders are hunched. The difference between a slumped posture and a straight one is enormous, and I can instantly feel the energetic change upon making that adjustment. I can make it while standing in line at the grocery store, while chopping vegetables in my kitchen, and while meditating, to name a few instances.
Regarding meditation, de Salzmann says, “The position of the body is very important. It must be precise in order to allow a field of energy to be established. At the same time, I must feel an ease, a well-being, a kind of stability that allows my mind to come to a state of total availability, to empty itself in a natural way, to let go of the agitation of thoughts. With a right posture my centers come together and can be related. This requires close and continual cooperation between my thought, my feeling and my body. As soon as they separate, the posture is no longer held.” I have experienced this separation and its result countless times while meditating. I only recently realized that seated meditation is actually a very active thing. For years I’d been thinking that the physical act of sitting should be pretty effortless, and it’s the mind part that’s difficult, but in order to maintain the kind of posture de Salzmann is talking about, one must engage a lot of different muscles. Of course they’re not engaged to their full potential, but it’s still significant, and when my attention gets caught by thought, that engagement falls away, and my once-again-slumped posture is often what alerts me to the fact that I’ve essentially left the present moment and am captive to the past, the future, or some kind of fantasy.
Tension in my body is also a common clue in this regard. When my attention gets lured away from my breath and back to thought, I often notice that muscular tension arises—which is different from muscular engagement, in that it’s not serving any helpful purpose. De Salzmann says, “Tension and relaxation have great importance for the way in which we manifest and relate to the world around us. We tense toward life in order to take, to oppose, to master…But these tensions separate us from a subtle energy, a more essential reality. We are imprisoned by tensions, and our possibilities are not developed. Our attention can never have an action if there is a tense resistance in the body. It is retained on the surface, unable to penetrate deeper levels in ourselves.” How many of us are walking around with bodies that are basically tense all the time, and we don’t even know it? Sometimes I notice this when I’m lying in bed at night, having a hard time falling asleep. I’ll realize that my entire body—but especially my neck and shoulder girdle—are stiff, as if bracing for some mysterious impact. And in realizing this, I instantly relax. I focus on feeling the full weight of myself on the mattress, and sleep becomes less elusive. So often the key to changing any unconscious behavior is noticing it, becoming aware. And then it takes care of itself.
Reminding me very much of Bernard Bassett’s book We Neurotics, which asserts that God is at his best when we are relaxed, de Salzmann says, “The creative action of the life force appears only where there is no tension, that is, only in the void. If I wish to develop my being, I must come to this point of no tension…I become conscious of the void by the change in my sensation, which becomes finer as tensions are dissolved.” And in dissolving these tensions, we are better able to contact what-all they’ve been obstructing—which is to say, reality. De Salzmann asserts, “There is in me an essential energy that is the basis of all that exists.” And of course we could all say the same of ourselves. But how often do we really feel that truth? Indeed, de Salzmann would say that feeling truth is the only way to experience it; she says it cannot be thought. In order to feel within ourselves “the essential energy that is the basis of all that exists,” we must try to be present with ourselves, on a regular basis, every day. And in that presence we are aligning with the only thing that’s actually real, according to de Salzmann. Like Ram Dass, who in Be Here Now says that we can only every interact with ourselves, Madame says, “Consciousness is always consciousness of self.” I think most Buddhists would also agree, given the Buddhist belief that we create the world with our minds. So if our minds are tense and conflicted all the time, and we are essentially blind to our true nature, we will create that kind of world. And we certainly have.
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One of my favorite musicians, Angel Olsen, recently released an album called Big Time and there’s a song on it whose lyrics I can’t help but relate to some of the ideas de Salzmann explores in The Reality of Being. First of all, there’s the title of Olsen’s song: “Go Home.” One could argue—and I guess I am—that seeing the reality of being is a kind of homecoming. In our normal “asleep” state, we maintain the illusion of separateness and as a result walk around feeling essentially homesick much of the time. I’d say we also maintain the illusion of the past and the future at the expense of not really being in the present moment, which is the only place we belong, our only true home.
Then there’s the lyrics in the first verse: “the truth is with you / you can’t rehearse it / pretend to know it / it’s time to live it.” As I mentioned before the music break, de Salzmann said that the truth cannot be thought. It cannot be known with our usual way of knowing. It must be experienced, or in Olsen’s words, “It’s time to live it.” Then, in the chorus she sings, “How can I go on / with all those old dreams / I am the ghost now / living those old scenes.” De Salzmann and Gurdjieff alike often talk in the language of dreams; they say that most people are asleep all of the time. And they might say that we are ghost-like, haunting what Olsen might call “the old scenes”—which de Salzmann might interpret as thought itself. She asserted that all thought is old, conditioned by the past. And to answer Olsen’s question, we can’t go on living those old dreams if we ever want to wake up and experience truth. Which is a question she answers herself in the final verse, when she sings, “Forget the old dream / I got a new thing.” For de Salzmann, the ultimate “new thing” is the challenge in the question of how we exist at all. This challenge is always new, she says. “My response is in the way I exist at the very moment, and the kind of action in which I am engaged.”
In the second verse of “Go Home” Olsen sings, “I feel like someone else, but I’m still trying, trying, trying,” reminding me of how de Salzmann says, “I feel the weight of the imagination of myself, the weight of this image that I feel compelled to sustain all the time in a violent battle to preserve its continuity. And behind it, I am aware of emptiness, a void…I do not know who I am.” And in the song’s chorus there is also the refrain of “nobody knows me,” to which de Salzmann might respond, “Nobody knows themselves. How could they possibly know you?” She says it of herself many times in The Reality of Being: “I have the impression of life in myself, but as soon as I think ‘It is me,’ I lose it.” And, “I am enclosed in a circle of petty interests and avidity in which my ‘I’ is lost.” And, “I do not know what I am.” And this doozy: “There is in me something mysterious that nothing is able to grasp, something that no thought or feeling can help me know. It appears only when I am not caught in the web of my thoughts and emotions. It is the unknown, which cannot be grasped with what I know.”
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Yes, it’s fun to ponder seemingly disparate ideas and make them fit together. But the ideas I’m talking about today—and in most of my blog posts—aren’t just amusing. They’re also quite serious. The notion that we’re all asleep, for instance, suggests on many levels that we’re all in grave danger. Would you want to be a passenger in a car whose driver was asleep? Well, Gurdjieff and de Salzmann would assert that you are. As human beings, we are all each other’s passengers and each other’s drivers, and we each contain within us a passenger and a driver. The driver must be awake in order reach the destination, and the destination is that awake-ness. De Salzmann puts it like this: “The attitude we take, our inner and outer posture, is at the same time our aim and our way.” The Zen Buddhists say that spiritual practice itself is enlightenment. Perhaps because the practice implies an awareness of the need for practice. As de Salzmann says, “In order to be present, I must see that I am asleep. ‘I’ am not here. I am enclosed in a circle of petty interests and avidity in which my ‘I’ is lost. And it will remain lost unless I can relate to something higher. The first condition is to know in myself a different quality, higher than what I ordinarily am… Without this condition there can be no work.” So (a) we must see that we have lost contact with our true selves, and (b) we must know that reestablishing contact is possible.
But as I mentioned earlier, de Salzmann wasn’t saying that we should maintain such contact all the time. She accepted that we all lead two lives. She said, “I must remember there is another life and at the same time experience the life that I am leading. This is awakening. I awake to these two realities.” And then, of course, she forgets that there is “another life,” referring to her internal world, which contains her “highest possibilities.” Madame writes, “The practice of being present is self-remembering. Instead of being taken outward, the attention of the functions is turned toward the inside for a moment of consciousness. I need to recognize that I can understand nothing if I cannot remember myself.” She also speaks of these two lives as a wish to move on the one hand, and a wish to be moved on the other. We want to act, and we also want to be acted upon. And lastly, she talks about the life in which we serve our own ideals, and the life in which we must play a role. "Inside we have to recognize our own nothingness and identify with nothing,” she says, "and outside we play a role.”
The challenge is to embrace that role but not identify with it, with what de Salzmann called our individual self: “We believe in our individuality, and this illusion supports our sense of existence. We are constantly striving to be something we are not, because we are afraid of being nothing.” But another way of saying that we’re nothing is to say that we are everything. As Ricky Gervais says in his most recent stand-up special (though he isn’t the first to say this), we human beings are a way for the universe to understand itself. I’d say all sentient beings serve this function to an extent, but it does seem like humans possess an especially unique intelligence to this end, and we are cosmically very powerful in this way. But I guess with such high potential there must also be its inverse. Like when one’s capacity for profound joy is balanced by a capacity for profound despair. Or we can remember Uncle Ben in Spiderman, who said that with great power comes great responsibility. We have been terribly irresponsible as a species, to the planet, to one another, and to ourselves. And I think the “ourselves” piece is most important, as it provides the foundation for the other two. And this lack of responsibility is a result of being ignorant to who we really are, to how powerful we really are—not in the sense that we can exert power over others or do harm (although obviously we can and do), but in that we contain the intelligence of the universe, in that we are truly miraculous and mysterious. I mean, we can observe our thoughts. What is even happening there? Who is that, doing the observing?
And this brings me to an idea that de Salzmann revisits a lot. J. Krishnamurti does, too. I’m talking about the notion of the observer being the observed. This concept gets especially trippy when you use your own thought as an example. So if “I” am observing “my” thoughts, that makes me the observer, but somehow I’m actually the one being observed? That’s where my brain doubles back on itself in endless funhouse mirrors and then goes blank. I cannot understand this idea. So then I try to simplify it with a more concrete example. Let’s say I’m observing a tree. If I’m actually the observed, does that mean I’m the tree? I know Krishnamurti would assert that I am not separate from the tree, but does that mean I am the tree? And in the thought example, does it mean I am my thoughts? This notion would go against a lot of what many spiritual teachers have asserted over millennia, that we are not our thoughts. But like Krishnamurti, de Salzmann seems to disagree. In The Reality of Being, she says, “Order can be born in us only if we enter into direct contact with disorder. We are not in the disorder. We are the state of disorder. If I look at what I really am, I see the disorder. And where there is direct contact, there is an immediate action.”
Let’s suppose that by “disorder” de Salzmann is referring to some kind of intense emotion, or perhaps many intense emotions at once. But for the purpose of simplicity, we’ll stick with one: anger. So Madame seems to be saying that we do not have anger, we are anger. And to realize in a given moment that we are anger, is to enter into direct contact with it. And when that contact happens, we act without hesitating. But would such action, in the case of anger, be helpful? Is not “seeing red” another way of saying that we become anger and act on it? I don’t know… Maybe anger is too tricky an example. It’s interesting to think about, though, this notion of separation. But de Salzmann would say that such thinking is separation: “Here we discover the source of thinking. We see that the division between the observer and the observed is at the origin of our thought. The observer is grounded in memory, that which knows from past experience…But when the observer is the observed—when the thinking is the experience—then there is no more thought. There is a state of tranquility in which an impression can be received as new, as with little children.” Maybe this is what Christ meant when he said "except ye be converted and become as little children, you’ll never enter into the kingdom of heaven,” or something like that. And I do love tripping out on thinking about how babies think. They don’t do it in words, that’s for sure. So is it images? In the case of really young babies, they only have so many images to work with, because they’ve only been exposed to a handful of them, and their vision is blurry anyway. But we know there’s some serious intelligence happening behind those poorly sighted eyes of theirs. Looking into a baby’s eyes is like looking into consciousness distilled down to its purest, most potent form. It’s consciousness before it has separated from its source. Consciousness without thought. De Salzmann is saying that this is a state we must try to return to. But not in any permanent kind of way. She allows that this feeling of Presence with a capital P is difficult to sustain. “But,” she says, “I can repeat, and I can again find the same force, the same taste of something real. Then I struggle not to disappear so quickly in the activity, and I try to see what is required to be present.” So it’s not all or nothing, and those of us who are interested in awakening to the true reality of being therefore have no excuse not to practice. Some of us might be discouraged by too-high expectations to achieve some exalted state, but all we’re trying to do is remain present for a little longer than we did the last time we practiced. Madame even says that “simply remaining above the level of sleep—a little higher but in a way that has some stability—is itself extraordinary.”
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The last of de Salzmann’s ideas that I want to explore is what she calls “the most important question of my life.” It is a question of life or death, which she must constantly make herself remember: “What do I wish?” But the “I” in this question cannot be her “ordinary I,” or ego. It is not out to acquire or achieve anything. It has no desire for a particular result. It merely wishes to be in a certain way. “What do I wish” means “How do I want to live my life?”
It sounds pretty obvious and basic, but how many of us are actually letting this question guide our lives? How many of us are truly running our own show, in real time? I’d venture it’s a minuscule fraction of how many of us are running on autopilot, working with the same handful of preset options for how to respond to life’s infinite variations. Reacting almost entirely out of conditioned emotions that we never stop to question, that we repeatedly mistake for factual information. De Salzmann says that emotions are not facts. “They are the reaction of my conditioning to impressions, to everything that impresses me. But I blindly trust my feelings. I never doubt them. I believe they express a pure vision and do not see that they really reflect implacable conditioning. Because of this I do not see the absolute necessity to observe them—that is, to remain in front of them without reacting, to be merciless toward my desire to react.”
I love that. Would that we all were merciless toward our desire to react. In some cases, of course, our desire to react must be respected. Like if someone is trying to hurt you or someone you care about. But that sort of reaction is more instinctual and necessary than the sort de Salzmann seems to be talking about. Of course we need to react to certain things in our environment in order to stay alive and help others do the same, but we don’t need to react if someone cuts us off in traffic, or someone else’s words hurt our feelings. We can respond, sure, but only after we’ve investigated the conditioning that’s behind the hurt feelings.
But back to this question of “What do I wish?” or “How do I want to live my life?” I’d love for our society as a whole to ponder this. What do we wish? How do we want to live our collective life? Do we want to be in conflict all the time? To react to everything we don’t like with fear or anger or a combo of the two? Or do we want to live in ever-greater harmony with one another, responding to everything with some version of love? Surely most psychologically sound human beings would opt for the latter way of being. And I’m not saying that responding with love to everything that happens is an easy thing to do. Actually, I think that’s probably the common perception of the whole “all you need is love” idea—that love is easy, and the people singing its praises are vapid and naive. But the reason we haven’t been more loving in our dealings with nature and one another is because it is incredibly difficult. You know what’s easy? Anger. Outrage. Indignation. And it all just feeds on itself.
But of course I cannot make every human being to stop reacting from places of fear and anger. Literally all I can do is practice what I preach, and try my best every day to respond with love to everything that happens. It is ridiculously easy to lose sight of this intention or just altogether forget it, so I agree with de Salzmann that I must cultivate a habit of asking that life or death question every day, multiple times a day, or perhaps constantly, like a mantra: What do I wish?
