Excerpt from presentation:
I shall finish on this occasion with a few more remarks and a personal note. I was a very despondent individual lacking completely in self-confidence. I went to see him once a few years before he died and I started to wail as people do who start in this kind of work. "Oh Mr. Bennett, I cannot work on myself. I am failing." And he said, "That doesn't matter. Just do a bit of work on yourself, it's like keeping up muscle tone." He said that there are supernatural energies which work. Our job is to connect with them. There really is something working. It has produced the whole universe. This life on earth. It's extremely effective, and very positive. You can be positive idiotically or you can be positive consciously. So Bennett tapped into the central issue from which Gurdjieff began. There is something which can call on all our energy, all our intelligence, our heart, and everything. It demands all of our everything. Gurdjieff's book, All and Everything was not really to show how clever Gurdjieff was at understanding the laws of the universe. Its purpose was to completely freak out your mind. He delved to the limit of what you could think, just right to the edge of what you could possibly conceive of. That was the point of the book. Take your thinking as far as you can. It cleans you out. We are thinking beings, regardless. We've got to come to terms with different things like the creation of the universe, its structure, with the origin of human life, what happened forty thousand years ago - not by reading the Scientific American, but by considering it in ourselves, by finding it in ourselves. We must do this, constantly do this, otherwise we are simply being driven by our culture. We must try to get back to the origins of things, to ask the questions, to find the help we need. Even while immersed in this, one isn't sure. There can't be any guarantee. Who is going to give you the guarantee? If somebody comes forward and tells you "You're doing great!" why should you trust him?
Full text: http://www.duversity.org/archives/solioonensius.html
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