The Payment

The Payment

Based on a post from my friend Vale Lama in the Milan Center

One of the principles of the System is that to really value something, a man must pay to get it. Getting it for free, without effort, means you won’t appreciate it enough. What is the payment in the Fourth Way? My teacher says when you are on the Way, the price, the privilege, and the payment is revealed to you. In my experience of self-work several primary forms of payment are not mutually exclusive.

The most obvious method is payment in money or material goods. The willingness to pay for something in money often distinguishes those who are really interested from those who are not.

Another form of payment is effort. To make efforts to hold to an exercise, for example, like those proposed by Sergio Antonio in a recent online meeting, requires a special kind of payment. For example, in our School we are asked to not do certain things, like smoking, or to sustain a commitment in some area, such as preparing a Facebook post every Friday. We are willing to make greater efforts for the things that we consider important. This is not simply a moral fact, but it corresponds to a precise use of energy used in a direction that creates something different in us. Every time we make an effort to be more awake, it is as if we “pay” by renouncing the mechanical aspects of existence, making way for the gradual creation of our soul.

Payment is accepting a negative emotion or suffering. Here, you need to be careful not to consider payment a punitive thing. A beautiful poem by Hafiz says: “God is trying to sell you something, but you don’t want to buy. This is what your suffering is: your unbelievable hunger to negotiate on the price!” From the standpoint of awakening, the transformation of negative emotions and suffering is only an opportunity.

Another special form of payment is the renunciation of our homemade idea of ourselves, the imaginary portrait, the delusional sense of our unique and unified being that resides in the machine. Gradually abandoning the imaginary portrait, letting our observer see our mechanics—accepting that we are not what we thought—requires tremendous and continuous payment, at least equivalent to the wonder of its countervalue.

The poet, R.M. Rilke in his first Duino Elegy describes this payment of sacrificing our imaginary picture: “Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer, to give up customs one barely had time to learn, not to see roses and other promising Things in terms of a human future; no longer to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave even one's own first name behind, forgetting it as easily as a child abandons a broken toy. Strange to no longer desire one's desires. Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction. And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity.”

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Petrus Christus, A Goldsmith in His Shop (Possibly St. Eligius), 1449