Sometimes we might go several days without finding a suitable place to apply this method of reasoning. If that happens, it’s because we haven’t yet grasped what reasoning is really about.
We are constantly in front of the situation, “What should I do now, in this moment?” Generally we just let the world decide for us in terms of habit, external influences, and the law of accident. But it's possible, and indeed necessary for us to stop using this mechanical approach to life and become intentional about our lives. This intentionality would initiate a process of reasoning at every point in the day where we are about to start a new activity, even if that activity is as simple as walking to the car. That’s right, not only ‘can’ we reason about the seemingly simple activity of walking to our car, but we actually need to do that in order to transform our lives.
Our emotional nature enters into the reasoning process in three quite distinct but interrelated ways.
The first way is that emotions and our emotional nature have to be fully accounted for in any situation. Constructing a logical process full of “shoulds” which ignores the emotional reactions we all have is bound to fail. This is easy enough to say, but the variety and complexity of emotional influences we are all subject to, creates a profound challenge. Nevertheless, it’s a challenge that has to be met.
Sometimes reasoning does not have to be some big, earthshaking process to be profound. Case in point is something that happened earlier today.
I’ve been trying to learn how to speak Hebrew, and have felt some frustration because normal written Hebrew doesn’t include vowels. These “vowels” are not letters as in English, but rather they are (usually) small makings or “pointings” called nikud. Or rather they would be small markings if they were normally included, which they aren't. Of course, just to add to the confusion, sometimes these vowels actually do come in the form of a written letter. But without the nikud, it’s very difficult for someone learning the language to ‘guess’ whether they are seeing a vowel or a consonant.
One of the hardest things to understand about reasoning with oneself is how this process differs from simply thinking about things, applying logic, being ‘practical’, or any of the other things that we normally group under the heading of reasoning. The main difference is that it’s not our thoughts or our thinking that changes; it’s really our will that changes. One can go further by saying that reasoning gives us a power of decision, based on reality, which allows us to take effective action. One can go even further by saying that reasoning allows us to literally create a new reality for ourselves.
In working with this theme of reasoning I asked some of the online group participants to take up the challenge of doing two or three reasoning processes this week, and reporting on their experiences. What they were asked to do was this:
TASK FOR THE WEEK:
… “to individually go through a process of reasoning two or three times this week to gain some familiarity with this method, and then post our experiences on our individual blogs. There are roughly four simple steps to this task, and it might help us to blog them in this order:
Here's my situation.
Here's my reasoning process
Here's the outcome to my reasoning process
Here's what I learned, observed, discovered, thought about, had a question about, from all of this. “
I haven’t wanted to highlight this question, as it can be a little discouraging. But it came up today in one of our sessions, so we need to face the reality of what we have to work with. Fortunately for us, we’ve already covered a significant number of these approaches, and so the situation is not as daunting as it might at first appear.
So how many ways of Reasoning are there? The simple answer is “lots”. An even simpler answer is, just one… because there is only one reality, and the aim of our reasoning process is to contact that reality.
One of the participants in the online study group had this to say yesterday:
“JG raised a challenging point in today's (13 Jan) session regarding partial or faulty reasoning, that reasoning can be applied for our benefit or detriment and there are several factors that can influence these opposite outcomes. I hope [he] will write a post about his thoughts since some of the distinctions he made seem quite important for bringing 'discriminating wisdom' to the process of understanding our reasoning.
Many people, maybe even most people, seem to think that the 4th Way, the Work, is mainly about personal transformation for individuals. If one observed how most Work groups operate, or read descriptions of Gurdjieff’s activities it would certainly look that way. But how would it look if we put this assumption through a process of reasoning?
I partially did that today in response to someone in our group, who was shocked to hear me say,
Another aspect of our inner resistance is suggestion. I was just editing a chapter from Abdullah Dugan’s book, “The Quest” on this topic, when it struck me that both the positive and the negative effects of suggestions influence our ability to reason. In terms of the question, “What keeps us from being able to reason effectively?”, the following questions and responses are worth noting.
So real thought would be the only thing you could counter suggestion with?
“By using your three brains you can know how to weigh up a suggestion. You have to work in a balanced way to be able to understand suggestion. A suggestion may be levelled at your moving centre, and because of your experience in your moving centre you could say "That's just rubbish", whereas another person who wasn't developed in his moving centre would believe it...
Over the last few days we’ve talked about the reasoning process from a number of different perspectives. And in answer to the question above we could cite several explanations such as not having much experience with ‘real’ reasoning, mistaking our ordinary thinking process for ‘real’ reasoning, lack of courage, lack of support from our environment, and so on. However, probably the main obstacle for many of us is that we just flat don’t want to do it.
