Probe – Real Thought
What is it that I wish? What do I want? What do I feel I need? Every wish creates a potential line of intention. So what do I wish and do any of these wishes conflict with my greatest wish, which is to be, to remember myself? Once I truly see the need to be, to remember myself—out of that need—comes the wish. And that wish has to be renewed and renewed. And in making that wish, I admit then, that I ‘am not’ and wish ‘to be.’ That’s what’s essential.
Let’s think about something, together. To really think, interestingly enough, I have to allow the mind to lose its grip, to allow it to dissolve into the body, to redirect the attention out of the forebrain. As that is done relative to the non-effort, a spaciousness is created. The mind is emptied of thought, concern, and I come in contact with the instinctive center through the sensation. I’m then in a position to feel what I’m going to think about.…
We are the image of God. This is the only truth that has come down to us according to Mr. Gurdjieff.
Supreme Being, Absolute Being. We’ve all experienced certainly nonbeing in our efforts to be. Most people not making that effort believe that they actually have being. Everyone here recognizes in the attempt to be, how little they are, how much we reside in nonbeing.
We can certainly see the mechanical laws of nature, a plant is a plant; a lion, a lion. They can be nothing else, they can’t evolve or devolve. Human beings—a possibility to evolve and devolve; evolution, involution.
The image of God. Are we the unconscious image of God.…?
Mr. Gurdjieff speaks about relieving God’s sorrow. As we become more and more conscious, we come into more and more being and so we truly become then the image of the Godhead.
Of all of God’s created creatures, Mr. Gurdjieff says that He places his hope and trust in us. Because only we can evolve, devolve. We are the great gamble of God. With each of our arisings God has thrown the dice that you and I would strive to become conscious.
A commandment that Mr. Gurdjieff gives is, do not kill another even when your life is in danger. If we kill we are killing an image of God. All phenomena are all fractions of the whole phenomena that exists on the Holy Sun Absolute. We are successive fractions. The wholeness exists in God. So, as we come into being we come into conscious fraction, and recognizing that conscious fraction we come into wholeness. The wholeness that can be given by a supreme being to that which is mortal and, according to Mr. Gurdjieff, can at its highest, reach immortality within the solar system. So that is why we are here not only here on Earth but here now working on ourselves.
To think and feel at the same time. To simply think is to use logic, we don’t know what we are talking about because we don’t feel it. And to feel something without thinking is simply to feel, there’s no reason to it, no balance. It’s totally open to imagination—extremes of all types.
So we have all experienced now what it is to think even if it has only been for a fraction of a time. Everyone here has been initiated into thinking to the degree you allowed yourself, and so the mirror has cracked.
We can think.
—William Patrick Patterson
Sayings of Substance
Gurdjieff on Theosophy
There are two lines known in Europe, namely theosophy and so-called Western occultism, which have resulted from a mixture of the fundamental lines. Both lines bear in themselves grains of truth, but neither of them possesses full knowledge and therefore attempts to bring them to practical realization give only negative results.
A grain of truth in an unaltered form is sometimes found in pseudo-esoteric movements, in church religions, in occult and theosophical schools.
There are many things worse than ‘black magic.’ Such are various ‘occult’ and theosophical societies and groups. Not only have their teachers never been at a school but they have never even met anyone who has been near a school. Their work simply consists in aping.
People giving themselves up to various ‘woeful’ ideas in these spheres of quasi-human knowledge, which, in different epochs, bore different names, and which today are called ‘occultism,’ ‘theosophism,’ ‘spiritualism’…
In my opinion, my work and ideas greatly interested, from the very beginning, such people as were already in the highest degree ‘possessed’ of the before-mentioned ‘specific-psychosis’ and were accordingly known to those around them as being preoccupied with every kind of ‘nonsense’ otherwise known under such names as ‘occultism,’ ‘theosophism’…
Now continue to engender only all kinds of ‘pseudo-teachings’ there, like those existing there in recent times under the names of ‘Occultism,’ ‘Theosophy,’ ‘Spiritualism’…
Gurdjieff on His Teaching
The teaching whose theory is here being set out is completely self-supporting and independent of other lines and it has been completely unknown up to the present time.
My teaching is my own. It combines all the evidence of ancient truth that I collected in my travels with all the knowledge I have acquired through my own personal work.
He had said innumerable times, ‘When my teaching understood, will not be any more electric light.’
The arrogation and leveling of
Mr. Gurdjieff’s teaching of
The Fourth Way continues.
Gurdjieff was unequivocal.
Sources for Sayings of Substance are:
In Search of the Miraculous 286, 314, 227
The Herald of Coming Good 21–22, 26
All & Everything 249
Our Life with Mr. Gurdjieff 183
The Gurdjieff Years 117
Sport & The Death of Brains
X-ray photo above: Of 111 football players in the NFL, from every position on the field — quarterbacks, running backs, linebackers, a place-kicker and a punter—10 were found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative disease believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head.
Now let us talk about that particularly maleficent invention of the ancient Greeks, which is being actualized in practice at the present time by the beings of the contemporary community there, called England, and which invention they call ‘sport.’
For Gurdjieff, the steady capturing of everyone’s attention by this activity is potentially dangerous for several reasons. Not only has sport become a distraction used by power-possessors to manipulate the masses, it poses a threat to the physical health and well-being of people, even to the point, in some cases, of decreasing their life spans. For the aim of spiritual evolution, Gurdjieff gives us an even more urgent warning in the quote above, especially given the wide societal emphasis on sport and its inflation in the media: sport robs us of attention, vital to our potency to Work.
Where Is the Attention in Sport?
We are lived by internal or external influences of the moment. Our attention is continually being taken, identified—continually captured. At other times when there is strong interest, desire or a problem needs to be solved, we can experience a concentration or focusing of attention that is directed, or one-pointed. In both cases we are asleep to ourselves. That is, we have no sense of ourselves as beings in sensation of the whole of ourselves having three brains (mental, emotional, and instinctive/moving/sexual), each participating in the experiencing. Either we are entirely dispersed or driven by the desire of one of our brains impelling a mechanical one-pointedness.
Olga de Hartmann writes,
Mr. Gurdjieff told us very seriously that attention is absolutely indispensable for any work we wished to do with him. If we did not understand that, nothing could bring us to the aim for which we came to him. All of us there already felt that we were more than just a body. We knew that ‘something else’ was in us, and we wished to know: what is that? What have we to do with that? How can we call to it? How can we bring it out? How can we rely on it and not depend only on the body? All this was really a burning question for us, and Mr. Gurdjieff made it clear that if we didn’t study attention—not study in the ordinary way, but putting all our attention on developing that attention—we would arrive nowhere. …