How This Essay Came to be Written

How This Essay Came to be Written

The main insight of this piece concerns the “points of disharmony,” numbers 4 and 5 on the Enneagram as described by Bennett, Vollmar and every other author I have read who was influenced by Gurdjieff or his pupils. This is how it came to me:
Phyllis Laursen has used the term “Harmony Through Conflict” as long as I have known her. I originally interpreted it to mean the process whereby an organism (a person or a social group) maintains its inner harmony through an externally focused conflict. An example is the high approval ratings of US Presidents when engaged in military action: the familiar “common enemy” allowing the smoothing over of internal conflict. It is possible to interpret most interpersonal conflict in this way, as a way of avoiding intrapersonal conflict (when “buffers” begin to break down, the individual finds a target to fight with as way of restoring them). I also knew that it was somehow connected with what was “wrong” about the work at Claymont, but I could not figure out how.
In August 1996 I spent a week with Phyllis in northern California. My wife was preparing to leave our home and move to Oregon, taking our daughter along. Some of the time we were in Livermore, some of the time in Marin County, near the San Francisco Zen Center. One day we were driving along the coast road, and I started thinking about the Enneagram, which I almost never do. I had almost a vision of how the gaps in the process are required for the interconnection of all things, for the reciprocal maintenance of the Universe. I have attempted to reproduce the information in visual form in one of the pages of this essay. I spoke to Phyllis about the necessity of imperfection, and she told me this was the main point of Zen.
I want to emphasize that we did no “Work” on this trip of which I was aware. No “superefforts” were made, no suffering either intentional or voluntary took place (although I was in a lot of pain over the impending loss of my family). My impression when I had this insight about Zen and imperfection was that it was accidental. It was overflow from the energy or Wisdom that Phyllis was pouring into me to help me deal with my pain. My glass became, not half full or half empty, but overfull and stuff just started to spill out.
On the way home I stopped at the airport bookstore, they happened to have a copy of Vollmar’s book, and I bought it. While changing planes in Chicago I came to his description of the “dark night of the Soul” and the points of maximum disharmony, and realized this had to be wrong, that this was Harmony Through Conflict. After that it was just a process of working through the insight so that it could be confirmed to my rational mind and communicated through words and images.
Harmony Through Conflict is a central myth of almost every human culture. It is the structure of the heroic approach to life. The antidote to Harmony Through Conflict is Coyote/Hermes/Loki, the Trickster who shows us that all our judgements are wrong, all our expectations are foolish, that Wisdom manifests only in this moment NOW, and cannot be captured in a vessel and saved up for when we might really need it.

It is my hope that this essay will resolve a misunderstanding that has plagued Gurdjieff’s and Bennett’s students and been the cause of their being “stuck.”

If you believe that you are stuck in Harmony Through Conflict, I recommend the following books:
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Shambala 1973, ISBN 0-87773-050-4
The Myth of Freedom, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Shambala 1976, ISBN 0-87773-084-9
The Impersonal Life, Joseph S. Benner, DeVorss

best wishes,
Christian Doering

Conflict and Co-Creation