From “This Fundamental Quest” by Henriette Lannes

Our Functions (excerpted)

We can demand work from our functions just like a peasant demanding work from his donkey. For a long time, we fail to understand that there are various functions in us and something else, something alive beyond the functional level. To experience its reality, we must try to be more active inwardly. Only then will another kind of attention establish a relation between ourselves and the outer task that it falls to us to accomplish with the help of one or more of our functions. Through being more attentive, we can, for example, sense that our hands open or close while doing certain work, and sense that our energy is not dissipating itself in dreams or useless tensions.

Let us examine our way of "doing" through each of our functions — moving, intellectual, and emotional.

Our moving function has been educated from birth to do an incredible number of things: at the right moment, the baby learns to hold its own bottle, the toddler learns to walk, and the adult can walk the streets of his city nearly with eyes closed. Through this moving function we can best realize that we are not the one who acts. Let us try to observe this as often as possible.

Our intellect has taken up residence as the master of our inner lives. It has possessed us for our entire lives and will probably continue to do so unless we awaken, unless we realize our situation. But it is like a sleeper who hears someone shout "Fire!" It thinks that the neighbor's house is in danger... By observing ourselves, we discover that this intellectual machinery takes much of our energy.

And our emotional function — how does it manifest? Usually, our emotion is not an open book. We realize it is there when someone pricks our self-love, our vanity, our pride. Our world of emotion offers no easy approach. Yet at certain moments we can observe that emotion steals energy from the head. We witness a kind of robbery, and the thief is ourselves. Our sense of I is swallowed up in this world. And we need to return each time to a sincere wish to know ourselves in order to pull free.

Correctly conducted self-observation shows us that we express negative emotions, quite often cleverly disguised. How to enter into communication with them? What ear do we have to listen to what they say? Why do we kneel before them? Facing these questions is an urgent matter.

It may be possible for us to withdraw a little energy from our agitated emotional world, to quieten ourselves, to rediscover a more available attention, to sense ourselves more there, living in the present.

In a more serene emotional climate, we can experience the vibration of our need to know, to understand. This need can originate either in intellect or in emotion.

These observations are difficult, but they move toward real knowledge of ourselves and of others. We need these questions to be with us more often, at the center of our lives. From experience to experience, from observation to observation, we see that without vigilant attention we permit confusion in ourselves between doing and being. In order to live with wholeness, we need all of our functions to come together and serve our need to be.