When Life is Real

(Being Real: 1)

Gurdjieff titled one of his books: Life Is Real Only Then, When "I Am." That title is usually taken to mean that we are real only when we are present. Assuredly, that meaning is both true and profound. However, the meaning goes beyond even that. The life referred to is not just our personal life, it is Life writ large, all that lives.[1] This interpretation hinges on the meaning of real. What makes something real? What is real?

Our best understanding of matters of the spirit comes by looking into our own experience. When we are on autopilot, with thought-trains running, emotions reacting, and well-worn patterns dominating, there is effectively no one home in us. Life is happening without our participation, with minimal direction or intention from us. Although this mode has physical reality, it lacks the lived reality of someone actually living it.

Even when we step far enough into the present to have contact with our senses, so that we feel what we feel, see what we see, and hear what we hear, experience remains bounded in and by the senses. Experience in the world of contact is more real than in the autopilot world, but the sense of someone experiencing it remains weak.

Only in the world of presence can we truly say I am. Our senses are there and we are there to receive them and to act. Then we are the one who sees what we see, who does what we do, and who experiences what we experience. Below that level, that one is weak or missing. The level of presence is where Reality begins. It begins with us, with our I, when we stabilize our attention, backed by and rooted in our will. It is our will that makes us real.

If we are free in this presence, free of self-centered egoism, then it is true presence. It is the universe spiritualizing itself through us. Atman revealed as Brahman. This happens with every act of presence, every act of prayer or meditation, and every time we do the right thing even in the face of our contrary inclinations. It is not just that we become real when we are truly present, but that the whole of life becomes real when we are truly present.[2] Indeed, the whole universe becomes real.

The act of becoming present, though simple and seemingly unremarkable, is nevertheless momentous. It is more than personal: it is universal. And it is not only the universe coming into itself. It is closing a sacred loop: the Creator entering the universe through us, as us, when we are clear enough, pure enough to just be.

To come to that we need to have let go of our psychological dependence on, our identification with, the material world. And we need to have transcended and let go of being our mental and emotional reactions to the events of the world, both those immediately around us and beyond. And we need to have let go of our personality, of being our inner patterns, of identifying with our character. And finally, we need to have let go of our egoism, of that unchallenged world view that we are a separate self, and thus right in taking from life all we can, while giving little in return.

When we have let go of all that, transcending ourselves even for just a moment, to abandon being anything at all, we make room for and open to being the One Who is All, the One Who manifests as the universe, letting that Highest One be us for that moment. The Will that continually creates and maintains this universe is then also the will that is in us. When we are present, without a trace of identification, it is that deeper will that is us. We are present. Life is present. The universe is present. The Creator is present. Love comes in that unity. And then Life is Real.

[1] This article is a commentary on the view of Reality put forward by J.G. Bennett in his Theme Awareness of Reality, given July 10th and 14th of 1972.

[2] Note the congruence with the quantum theory view that things only become definite when they are observed.

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