Work
_AM: Do you do what you like? Are you a slave to a system? Do you live subject to your own projections? You're free?
_I: Isn't work a contradiction to freedom?
_AM: Etymologically speaking, yes…
_I: And historically…
_AM: Yes.
_I: So?
_AM: The idea of Work changed over time, it went from being animal torture to human torture, to representing the labor of childbirth and then to describing the dignity of earning one's daily bread, until today that It is a synonym for well-being and success. It would be necessary to see where you perceive the work from.
_I: Tell me… What is work really?
_AM: We will go through each of the aspects mentioned, taking into account that there are many ways to name this concept, and many ways to interpret it as well. But let's understand the meanings of it. The word work comes from the Latin “tri-palu”, that is, three sticks. These three wooden boards were placed in an X shape with an axis in the middle, like the letter ZHE in Cyrillic: “Ж”. This was used as a tool for blacksmiths, who tied farm animals to carry out their tasks of changing horseshoes and cleaning the hooves or hooves of horses and cattle. In times of war, the “tri-palu” were used to torture enemies, depriving them of their freedom. During the times of the empire, the tri-palu was used as a method of imprisonment, of punishment, of depriving those who thought differently of their freedom. It was a tool of torture during the inquisition.
_I: I don't understand why in Spanish and other Latin languages we associate the word work with this tool of torture.
_AM: Because before I wasn't. You can torture and kill someone with a knife, which does not mean that it was created for that. You use the knife to cut food, to cut things, and the fact that some use it to kill is different. A pen can also destroy lives, if you think about it in a broad sense, since the signature of many dictators has caused genocides.
_I: Of course... We have taken the other root, the previous one... That of the blacksmith.
_AM: Being a blacksmith was one of the most important jobs in the Roman Ages and the Middle Ages. Everyone had a tri-palu in their forges, and everyone went to them: shoemakers, jewelers, warriors, artisans, feudal lords, peasants... In a way, it was one of the most consulted trades.
_I: Sure… They had a lot of “work”.
_AM: And it was hard work… A lot of effort, day after day, to handle difficult elements. All activities that involve doing with the hands, “manufacturing”, tilling the land in the field, producing with the hands, with patience, the effort to manipulate the material. This effort involves suffering, physical pain, and means that those who exert this daily pressure find themselves every day on the verge of fainting, of falling, hanging by a thread at the end of the day, living on the edge of exhaustion just to survive. The Latinos called this “labor.”
_I: How? I always thought that the positive option of work was labor… So, isn't it?
_AM: Oh, no, of course not. Labor comes from “leb,” which in Indo-European means “to hang.” The concept refers to that which is on the verge of falling, that hangs by a thread, that can slip, slide, fall. “Leb” has given rise to words such as “lapse”, “collapse”, “prolapse”, and also “lip” and “lobe”. Thus, the verb that describes hanging by a thread, being on the verge of falling, fainting, would be “labor,” and the name that designates the concept of labor is “labor.”
_I: That's why it's called “labor”… Because the woman suffers from the contractions and during birth…
_AM: Unnecessarily, but yes, it does. Labor has brought us the idea of suffering working the land from dawn to dusk, something you call “tilling”, which would be “suffering while plowing”, opening furrows of earth for seeds. In Latin and Anglo-Saxon languages, the words “labor (labour)” and “labor (travail)” refer to actions carried out with effort, suffering…
_I: “Earn your bread by the sweat of your brow.”
_AM: This concept was coined throughout all of humanity, in which to obtain resources you had to put a lot of physical force, what they called “effort”, which produces muscle contraction, and when said pressure ends and distends, the sensation of pain. In English, the word “job” also designates situations of pain. From the religious vision (Jacobo, Jacob or Job, coming from the Hebrew name Yag, which in Latin you say “iagus” and which when he became a Saint you recognize today as “James”), Job became a synonym for martyrdom, for suffering to fulfill the work of God entrusted by Jesus on earth. His name reminds us of the effort to achieve something through constant pain. But at the same time, it has many other shared etymologies, among which probably the most logical is from the Greek “kópos” (to hit) which gives the English verb “chop”, which means “to peck” or “to dig”, like a woodpecker. , dedicated to working wood efficiently and consistently.
_I: “No pain, no gain,” they say… Which reminds me exactly of this. Without muscular effort, there was no food on the table. It was necessary to till the land to obtain food, struggle to build a house, face pain to create tools, and even fight to survive and defend achievements.
_AM: This is how labor and work became synonymous with success and security. Doing, doing and doing, over and over again, is what gives us repetitive, enslaving, routine work, that is, it rotates like a wheel. And here you will be surprised by other words that define this concept. The word “make” comes from the Indo-European “dhë”, which means “to put, place”, which gave the Latin “dhac/fac” (Portuguese “fazer”, French “fair”, Italian “fare”), and to the Saxon languages and Slavic “dhu” (English “do”, German “tun”, Russian “delat”). Although the word “do”, in Indo-European was said in another way: “werg”, which defines an action. When the Indo-Europeans divided, some going to India and others to central Europe, the latter converted the verb “werg” into 3 concepts: one Saxon (ärb, which gave rise to “arbeiten” in German), another Nordic (verk, which gave rise to “work” in English) and another Greek (ergon, which gives rise to words like “ergonomic”). But on the Indian side, “werg” gave rise to “kër”, which gave rise to the famous word “karma”.
_I: Wow… Working is karma, and it is directly related to the very origin of the word… Karma means “action.”
_AM: As you will see, looking back in time, you discover that in reality, everything connects to the concept of action. Action comes from the word “agere” or “ag” which means “to move”, “to shake”. And everything you do in your life is a movement, because the universe is constant movement. In this movement, you have two options: do it by the will of your spirit and for the pleasure of your creative being, or do it by reaction, external impulse, pressure from the environment, condition of the environment, which inflicts force, suffering, pain.
_I: Let's see... Then, show me both ways.
_AM: The best-known path that everyone faces is the one that is conditioned by the environment that surrounds them. In the Universe everything is action, but when a being is Unconscious or dominated by its Subconscious, there is no action that arises from itself, everything is done by reaction. He eats out of hunger, he reproduces to feel pleasure, he farms out of necessity, he works out of obligation, everything he does is to survive, fit in, belong. The environment, the family, society, beliefs, culture, nature, the environment; Everything that is around you is what leads you to action. Therefore his actions are conditioned, controlled, manipulated by external factors. He is not free. This leads to conceiving action as an expenditure of energy, and that energy is in the body, and to get it out you have to use force. And force produces muscular pain, which when repeated over and over again is called labor, and the job of the blacksmith is to be under the weight of the iron, do you remember?
_I: Yes… “Sub-ferrum”: suffering (under iron).
_AM: Thus, cellular memory transfers these data to the brain, which interprets pain not only as something physical, but as something emotional and psychological. Because of this, society begins to use labor as a synonym for punishment: slavery, service, forced labor. The same tools that people use to survive become tools of dominance and control, in which kingdom, feudal, empire and business systems use individuals to produce under pressure. And whoever doesn't do it is punished... How? With your own tools. Tri-palu, tripalium, work, travail... The inquisition, torture, and the concept of work as a form of oppression and punishment of the population arrive.
_I: Wow… and what is the Aware path to this?
_AM: Let's go back to the beginning of the Action. It can only be carried out by an original mind, a conscious being that decides to create a movement from point 0, without being a reaction to something previous, conditioned by previous experiences. It is a free mind, which chooses its own path. That is, he is a creative being. For a conscious being, the concepts of work, effort and labor do not have any meaning, since no one exerts pressure on him; because a conscious being is a free artist, creator of magnificent works. Creation is a Work of art, and whoever builds it is a “worker”. Work is also known as “opera”, since the origin of the Indo-European word is “op”, which means “to produce in abundance”. In Latin they called this “Opus”, thus, every worker, in reality, was an artist, creating, manifesting a work.
_I: The conscious being does not suffer work, it creates free works where it finds satisfaction.
_AM: Are you free or are you a slave?
_I: I realize that I am a slave to my own projects, to my own intentions. Sometimes, instead of enjoying what I'm creating, I feel the pressure to finish it to take a weight off my shoulders... Clearly, my subconscious continues to believe that if I don't work, if I don't feel the pressure, I'm not doing anything. Many times I feel useless, as if I live doing nothing, and I think of phrases that some people have said to me: “when are you going to stop doing what you do and really work?” “Find yourself a decent job”, “Work like a normal person”, “Stop living off the story”, and many times I believed that those phrases were the truth. I felt that if there was no effort or suffering, routine or feeling of slavery, it was not work. I remember my first partner, he said that the ideal thing for his mental health was to have a job 8 hours a day, with a contract and established vacation days that would give him the feeling that he had earned the rest after a good job. Like a prize, a reward. It always seemed to me that this vision was like a donkey's carrot, that did all the work, the effort, suffering, just to taste a tiny, juicy orange root. I came to think that the only way to achieve it would be that in this world. But no, I realized it wasn't, so I did something that wasn't right at all: I turned my own illusions into my work. I felt that I was doing what I wanted, that I chose and therefore I was free, but the only thing I did was decorate with work what I loved, with the intention of fitting into the system... Being accepted and not believing that "I lived off story, of the smoke”, believing that this way he would have “a job like other people”.
_AM: But no...
_I: No, that's exactly how everything went wrong, when I forced myself and suffered unnecessarily to do something that was really in my heart, for my freedom and creation. It was my work, and I turned it into my tri-palium. Today I am day by day, little by little, returning to what I do as the work of an artist, rather than as the work of a missionary. The question is whether all humans can do the same. Because there are things that involve hard work.
_AM: What you see as hard work, for another can be their liberation. What is freedom for you may be suffering for another. Each individual has a different way of applying his work in existence, and there are works for everyone, the mistake of this world is forcing some to make others' dreams. A world that awakens to the creative being of a child is a world that finds the work of an entire civilization that develops in the harmony of expansion and not in the survival of competition. Today, humanity continues to be a slave to work, because the system managed to make humans believe that “work gives dignity.”
_I: “Is work not dignified?”
_AM: No… It is the Work that dignifies. The hierarchical system built on survival and mistrust has made the population, individuals, believe that the way to be free is to earn one's own bread. Capitalism considers work as the only way to access resources and wealth through the competition of work. Communism considers work as what dignifies a human being who generates things with his own hands, but who obtains wealth from the hands of a state that chooses for him what he needs. Neither system incorporates the freedom of the creator. In both, the system turns individuals into slaves, but both have built the collective idea that only work provides dignity, since it is what allows you to get food on your own.
_I: It is the best slavery in history: in which the feudal lord or king does not have to support the slaves, because they pay for their things themselves.
_AM: Something like that, yes. But you cannot judge these systems, since both are born from the vision of the unconscious individual through the vision of suffering to get food. Individuals are never subjected by systems, but by their beliefs. Systems are the results of the ideas and beliefs of a collective of individuals.
_I: How do I free myself from the work of this system?
_AM: Remembering that you are an unlimited creator, and what you do is your work, and your work is what gives you life.
_I: But what if it doesn't work?
_AM: It will not be because you have to work, but because you have to find ways to create better... An artist does not stop because his first painting went wrong, an artist creates himself in each work.
_I: And when do you give the last brushstroke?
_AM: When your work transcends yourself, and thanks to it everyone has remembered that they are also the Creator.
_I: I stop using the word work, labor... The key to my work lies in what I like and what gives me pleasure. Its transcendence occurs when it transcends me and is useful to others.
_AM: There you are free, and in that freedom, you free others. Release your holy trinity from the limiting bonds of the tri-palium. Therefore, make your spirit, soul and body discover what they are capable of creating, and in it you will be abundant.
_I: “Free yourself from the fruit of action.”
_AM: Well, the fruit is the donkey's carrot, but the action is love.