Important Assignments of Life

Important Assignments of Life

“Never shirk the proper dispatch of your duty, no matter if you are freezing or hot, groggy or well-rested, vilified or praised, not even if dying or pressed by other demands. Even dying is one of the important assignments of life and, in this as in all else, make the most of your resources to do well the duty at hand.”— Marcus Aurelius

Pondering the inspirational words of Marcus Aurelius while trying to organize my thoughts about duty and good householder, I realized that composing this short essay is one of my “assignments of life” today. To meet this challenge with a positive attitude of doing “well the duty at hand” is what this present moment is offering. My understanding of householder is the effort made to balance the lower centers in order to reach and evoke Higher Centers. I think of this process as the conversion of raw fuel into luminous light.

P.D. Ouspensky writes that a householder "is a practical man; he is not formatory; he must have a certain amount of … practical thinking and self-discipline. A householder is a normal man, and a normal man, given favourable conditions, has the possibility of development.” Ouspensky continues to explain that, “Even the beginning of preparation for development needs a combination of external and internal conditions which only rarely come all together … they include among other things a School.” Fortunately, I am a normal woman and have had the luck to live in favorable conditions. If you have been following these posts, some of you might have realized already that you, too, have touched good fortune and met our School. Our Facebook page itself is not a school, nor are articles, books, quotes, and images about the Fourth Way, but the living people writing and communicating with you belong to and work within a conscious School.

Especially working within a conscious Teaching and given the good fortune of the “possibility of development,” I must not only attend to, but also learn to appreciate and be present to, the basic requirements of life, such as food, shelter, oxygen, water, energy, warmth, rest, growth, health, etc. All these instinctive needs assert themselves daily. The lower centers – the Instinctive, Moving, Emotional, and Intellectual Centers – each have their corresponding basic requirements to reach a balance which keeps further development a reality. When the needs of the lower centers are unstable or ignored, what I find is that these needs become louder, and nothing further can be built above this shaky foundation until I give them their due. It is the feeling I have when I cannot continue with anything else in my day until my essay for Facebook is complete. To have “my head in the clouds” without a foundation underneath is not sustainable.

Householder is an external manifestation of how to observe and order our internal world. As an example, for several years, I lived in a teaching house. It consisted of a group of Fourth Way students – around ten people – living together in one household. Most of us at one time or another have experienced living with roommates and so we understand the need to coordinate the chores that are necessary to make living together a mutually beneficial environment. Maintaining this external environment required grocery shopping, vacuuming, dusting, cleaning, paying bills, washing dishes, cooking meals, laundry, gardening, etc. When these external chores – good householder – were consistently attended to, there was a cooperative balance that allowed for other more soulful studies and activities to emerge.

This external harmony within a household is analogous to balancing and ordering our internal world. Just as there is discord and harmony in living together with others, there is also discord and harmony in the life of our soul. Internal discord are states of identification, imagination, and negative emotions. Before we can experience Higher Centers on a more regular basis, these areas of householder must be observed and worked with in our internal world. Our externals affect our internals, and our internals affect our externals. The sly man knows how to use both.

But what does Socrates say? “Just as one person delights in improving his farm, and another his horse, so I delight in attending to my own improvement day by day.” — Epictetus

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A Young Emir Studying (detail), Osman Hamdi Bey, 1878