A Happy Old Age
When I was younger and going to college in Bloomington, Indiana, I experienced a meeting I’ll never forget. It was a meeting of a quite older man bounding off in front of me from a bus, by himself, carrying a backpack. He quickly walked on, without speaking to us. But my friend, whom I was with, knew the man’s family and told me the story of this older man, who not long ago had been senile and bedridden. His grown daughter, seeing her father’s condition, of course resolved to help him. And as she was a nutritionist, she immediately put him on a strict diet of healthy fruits and vegetables and juices. After some length of time the elder man actually regained his thinking faculties, and became strong and healthy and independent, as I had seen him… An example of aging, turned around through the “shock” of outer conscious intervention.
A Musical Law
The spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff taught that “shocks” are an integral part of life. In his metaphysical system, all phenomena develop under what he called the Law of Octaves. This law designates that processes in the cosmos, and in Man, follow a pattern of seven successive steps, like notes in a musical scale. Importantly, these steps have two specific points within the pattern sequence which need a bit of extra energy — or “shocks” — necessary to keep the process on track, and for it to reach its goal.
(For musicians out there, the correct placement of the two “shocks” required for Gurdjieff’s “octave” would be at the two points between each of the two semi-tone steps of a major musical octave scale.)
Any phenomenon consisting of a beginning, a middle, and an end is under the law of octaves. Any such process in and of itself can be analyzed and described using the common “solfège” notation (do, re, me, etc) — the beginning of the process’s octave starting at a “do”, and its completion ending at a final “do” beginning the next octave.
Reaching Our Life Aim
Our lives, from birth to death, might be described as a series of stages — perhaps notes in one large octave if you will — that hopefully have us better off at our end than we were at our beginning. By our old age, we want to have reached the “do” of a higher octave, we want to have reached our goal in Life.
The spiritual teachers are clear: they say that we must engage in personal work to become better, to self-evolve. It cannot happen by itself, mechanically, or through some lazy magic.
The ancients “saw” that Mankind has two influences; they envisioned a good angel on the right shoulder whispering encouraging things, and a bad angel on the left leading to error. Regardless of what one believes, in practice the path upwards often means for Mankind swimming upriver, against the cosmic currents, against one’s lower nature.
The hardest part, in beginning the spiritual path, is growing a conscience. This is the first step, and the hardest. It entails developing certain emotions where there were none before. Emotions in relation to wrongs one has committed, and in regard to the ideals one wants to incorporate in one’s life. If the relevant emotions are developed, it is a sign that the first level on the path has been achieved.
While the first step on the spiritual path is emotional, the second step is intellectual. It entails beginning to know oneself in an intellectual way; learning to observe and monitor one’s whole being: physical, emotional, and intellectual. Gradually, one starts to form within oneself a nascent inner being. Something organized begins to form psychologically on the inside of oneself. This inner being signifies one’s arrival at the second level of the path.
Eventually, there arises the need for a teacher to appear. And it is here, that the actual Path itself with a capital “P” begins. When the teacher themself manifests, the spiritual aspirant begins the Work of development into the Perfect Human.
A Child: A New Creation
Although our lives can be seen as one large octave leading to an overall goal, we also have many sub-goals or sub-octaves running throughout our lives, that are perhaps equally important. Career, family, cultural or financial development, and many other things occupy our lives.
These aims sometimes almost seem to manifest through physical desires or urges. One of the main forces within a human being is the instinct of procreation. The sex drive is actually a very refined and powerful energy, alchemically. It is a part of a human octave of transformations which culminate in the penultimate “si” of the sex impulse. If we choose to complete that octave’s impulse by coming together with the opposite polarity of a partner, then a new creation, the “do” of a new octave or a child, is born.
An interesting way of viewing the act of procreation, is that there are in actuality two successive octaves in play. There is firstly the parents’ octave of creating a child. And then there is secondly that octave’s continuation to the next higher octave: that of the parents’ raising of the child — including the perfection of the child’s spiritual nature, as overseen by the parents. What began in a physical sense must be continued and finished in a spiritual sense.
A Second Birth
Having a child in one’s prime, is one example of the completion of an octave. However as we age it is possible for us to more easily sublimate the sexual drive. That excess sexual energy can then be diverted to reinforce other more refined octaves within ourselves.
Those inner octaves can, over time, alchemically help to increase our essence, to perfect our being, or — putting it another way — to produce within ourselves a metaphorical “spiritual child”. In theosophical lingo it is referred to as developing an astral body.
Maurice Nicoll, a close follower of Gurdjieff and Jung, writes:
“If a person begins to give himself the First Conscious Shock, the shock of Self-Remembering, the shock of the whole Work, if he begins to transform his daily contact with life and not take things as always in the ordinary way in which he always takes them, if he feels deeply that he is always doing something else and that he is related to something else which gradually becomes more important, then he may (…) create as it were a child that he has to look at very closely. What is this child? It is something quite new in him. He must pay attention to this new-born thing in him, which is the beginning of his own re-birth.”
— Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky p. 437
This “spiritual child” is the result of the development and completion of our original inner essence. In religious terms, it might be said to be what the New Testament calls the “second birth”.
Everything in its Place
One could postulate that our old age is simply the product or result of precisely the kind of life we have lived beforehand. Every choice we make throughout our life ultimately shapes our ending. Our kids end up our caretakers. The way we treat our physical body throughout our life determines our physical health in our old age. And the values we hold throughout our life shape our inner self later on — our mind and our feelings that we possess when we’re older.
The body and the mind are connected. But it is our inner essence or self that determines our merit at our end. If what we have inside of us is solid, good, and sincere, then it matters little if the outer form is frail. Our survivors, after we are gone, will think well of us for the strength of our soul, rather than the strength of our body.
If we have created something of great value that dwells within us at the end of our life — something that resonates with a higher world of love, kindness, and compassion — then that inner being of ours will find its home there, in that greater world.
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