The First Line of Work: Presence First

The First Line of Work: Presence First

Progress in the Fourth Way depends on efforts across “three lines of work.” The first line of work is the type of work that produces internal achievements for oneself, which also includes all the efforts that one makes for oneself. The second line of work refers to working productively with other students in the school and the third line refers to work that one does for the school or one’s teacher.

All three lines are necessary but without the first line, there is nothing. No progress. I will focus here on explaining what we mean by the first line of work. Our Teacher makes it abundantly clear, “In schools, internal achievements come first—presence first before anything else.” With that in mind and for the sake of simplicity, I will sketch out some of the stages or types of work that the first line entails from my experience. It is not particularly different for others in the Work, but I will tell it from my vantage point as I have come to understand it.

My first line journey is a long, enriching, and humbling endeavor that is not over (yet) but has revealed fruitful types of work and more or less discrete stages. Most of the posts you read on this site encompass these various approaches and phases, so I suggest you ponder the work ideas that have been most useful so far for you and do your best to attempt the impossible with some of the other ideas. I will highlight examples to illustrate the breadth and progression of my first line of Work, like other students.

In the beginning, my Magnetic Center accumulated knowledge and experiences that led me to the Fourth Way and thankfully to join the School. After learning the basic ideas, I had to immediately apply the new knowledge of self-remembering and struggle with my mechanical tendencies, such as the nonexpression of negative emotions and the other obstacles to awakening, without the being to do it. It seemed impossible and my sleep insurmountable. This is an exciting and humbling phase of the first line, however.

Exciting that the possibility of real self-work was available, but humbling as I verified my degree and types of sleep. The preponderance of sleep was (and is) daunting, but time and effort would prove these fears and apprehensions otherwise. If progress toward awakening were impossible, then I would have given up early on and we would have no examples of people who had escaped sleep and the grips of imagination. So, despite the setbacks and frustrations, the observing ‘I’ and my True Personality grew in which my Work ‘I’s coalesced and yielded internal achievements over time. I observed the miracle that I was creating something from nothing. Observing and learning to control the machine produced results for me, that is, for the other me, my higher Self.

My first line entered a phase of feeding essence and new efforts were necessary to neutralize the parts of my being uninterested in the Work. Without putting words to it at the time, my Work ‘I’s were transforming themselves into a rudder for my ship. I developed a Deputy Steward and Steward, as articulated in the book, The Fourth Way, in which Ouspensky draws on an Eastern allegory about a household of servants lacking a master:

“The only possibility for things to improve is if a certain number of servants decide to elect one of themselves as a deputy steward and in this way make him control the other servants. He can do only one thing: he puts each servant where he belongs and so they begin to do their right work. When this is done, there is the possibility of the real steward coming to replace the deputy steward and to prepare the house for the master.” – P.D. Ouspensky

As I continued my first line of work, I renewed my efforts over and over again to be present to my life, and before long my Schoolwork became my life. Sustained efforts to remember myself, in turn, led to new efforts and directions to sustain the state of Presence and to explore concepts bigger than my ego, like conscious love and “forgetting” oneself and pursuing unity rather than duality. While the effort to be present is never automatic or habit-forming, the momentum in the work propels the first line at a faster and faster pace. In this way, my first line became my new center of gravity and the pulls and heaviness from my mechanical lower parts, while never surrendering, reached a sort of state of détente. My first line continues and I make and remake myself each day and enlarge my state of awareness. Gratitude grows.

I admit that it is woefully incomplete to discuss the first line of work without discussing the second and third lines but, as the saying goes, “first things first” and I cannot overstate the preeminence of the first line. Nevertheless, like other students, there have indeed come times for me, when I lost my way, and it was the other lines that put me back on the straight and narrow path. Stay tuned for more on how the three lines work together.

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Immortality, Erastus Dow Palmer