"Remember yourself always and everywhere" - Gurdjieff.
Gurdjieff's Journey from Russia to Europe In 1917, the Russian Revolution forced Gurdjieff to depart Moscow for Essentuki. Here he opened the Institute but the mass psychosis of the time forced him to leave for Tiflis. In Tiflis he again opened the Institute but had to close it because of the harrowing conditions.
The Russian Revolution and the victory of the Bolsheviks—Gurdjieff termed Marxism "satanic"—made establishing the teaching in Russia impossible and he had to leave. Gurdjieff and his students arrived in Constantinople in June 1920. Ouspensky had arrived in January. He reconciled with Gurdjieff and gave him his pupils. Gurdjieff opened his Institute. However, with the city awash in refugees from the Revolution and a progressive secular on the increase, he closed it.
Gurdjieff saw now that he had to make a fateful and defining decision—whether to stay in Constantinople or take the teaching to Europe. Here he knew the language, had friends and resources. While in Europe he knew none of the languages, had no friends or resources. Like a true spiritual warrior, he stepped off into the unknown, leaving for Europe in August 1921.
After attempts to open the institute in Berlin and later in London proved fruitless, his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man was finally established at the Château du Prieuré at Fontainebleau-en-Avon in France, approximately forty miles southwest of Paris, on September 30, 1922.
In residence at the Prieure in 1922 were the Russian pupils, including Madame Ouspensky, Gurdjieff's family and his wife, the Polish Countess Julia Ostrowska. A. R. Orage, the famous editor of the influential New Age magazine and former student of P. D. Ouspensky arrived as well, followed in October by his friend, New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield, who was terminally ill with tuberculosis.
From England, Dr. Maurice Nicoll, a Harley Street specialist and early exponent of Jung, with his wife and child; Dr. James Carruthers Young, also a practioner of Jungian therapy; Miss Elizabeth Gordon, a well-to-do single woman, and Frank Pinder, a mining engineer and a major in British intelligence who had met Gurdjieff in Tiflis.
Six days a week the students would rise before six a.m., stopping their work in the kitchen, gardens and forest for brief meals and gathering at 8:30 in the evenings for gymnastics or dances. These tasks were almost always group activities. Different personalities, working together, produced subjective, human conflicts; human conflicts produced friction; friction revealed characteristics which, if observed, could reveal "self." For a further description of life at the Prieuré, read Boyhood with Gurdjieff and A Woman's Work With Gurdjieff, Ramana Maharshi, Krishnamurti, Anandamayi Ma & Pak Subuh.
Meditation, Buffers, Energy Blockages, Mechanical people, Essence, Gurdjieff Part 1 of 2
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Swami_Satchidanand]Swami Satchidanand
Gurdjieff died in 1949, about the same year as Ramana Maharshi.
Gurdjieff essentially synthesized ancient esoteric teachings and made them approachable and applicable to the lives of rational Western individuals. His concepts and methods are still seminal in the spiritual work of the west.
A seeker will find in his teachings an immeasurable treasure, the essence of so many other teachings, both spiritual and psychological, on the inner life.
This Gurdjieffian extraordinary system of thought, which ranges from the most intimate, psychological insights to a grandiose cosmology linking the individual with the universe, is a synthesis of practices and teachings known as The Fourth Way.
Then there is the man himself. Gurdjieff was the archetypal Master, beaming with extraordinary psychic powers developed in secret schools and monasteries somewhere between the Caucasus and the Himalayas; brutal soul-shattering insights; marvelous humor which was both ribald in the extreme and breathtakingly penetrating.
Gurdjieff also had a capacity for love that was matched only by his ability to express rage. He was a master hypnotist, a master actor, a master healer.
Those who encountered him often had opposite ideas of who he was, usually as a result of his own intentional behavior.
Like many Masters, Gurdjieff sometimes gave the impression of being a charlatan or mad to arrogant egotistic individuals, while to others he was the most enlightened man they would ever encounter.
His radiant energy, the Buddhafield of the Master, always acted on people's negative energies to send people with a lot of it away, and attracted people with a lot of good, positive Soul energy.
In such a way, as with all Masters, Gurdjieff consciously separated the evil weeds from the good grain!
This powerful Master Gurdjieff, with eyes that pierced to the depths of the soul was also an old man whose pockets were full of candy for the children.
He worked by many methods, to bypass the mind he worked with dance, Gurdjieff said, "I am a simple teacher of dance". Devi Dhyani has given performances of "The Sacred Dances of Gurdjieff" in order to radiate her Buddhafield more strongly, to throw out the bad and energise the good.
And when he explained the theory of the evolution of substances like hydrogens and oxygens in Ouspensky's book, "The Fourth Way", Gurdjieff was just tricking him, taking a very long winded intellectual theory to say to intellectual Ouspensky and to anyone else reading it, to bypass the mind, "You need the radiation of a Master to quicken your evolution!"
His major concepts were Buffers or Energy Blockages, Mechanical people, Sub - Personalities and the Soul Personality or Essence.
Mechanical People. For Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, mechanical persons are the mass of humanity and are asleep to their true condition and virtually incapable of change. "By himself, he is just an automaton with a certain store of memories of previous experiences, and a certain amount of reserve energy."
Everything happens to us as to puppets pulled by invisible strings.
Sub Personalities. Another central idea of Gurdjieff is that the individual is not one. We have no permanent "I" or Ego. Every thought, feeling, sensation, desire is an "I" or sub - personality which believes that it is the whole person.
Yet none of these "I's" are connected and each depends on the change of external circumstances. To make things worse, there are often impenetrable defenses between each "I" which the Work calls "buffers" or "Energy Blockages" separating these sub - personalities or Alters from one another.
Gurdjieff states that one of our most important mistakes we make is our illusion about our unity. Gurdjieff writes: "His "I" changes as quickly as his thoughts, feelings, and moods, and he makes the profound mistake in considering himself always one and the same person; in reality he is always a different person, not the one he was a moment ago."
Our every thought and desire lives separately and independently from the whole. According to Gurdjieff, we are made of thousands of separate I's, often unknown to one another, and sometime mutually exclusive and hostile to each other.
The alternation of I's is controlled by accidental external influences. There is nothing in us able to control the change of I's, mainly because we do not notice it. Each separate I calls itself "I" and acts in the name of the whole person. This explains why people so often make decisions and so seldom carry them out.
Gurdjieff healed alcoholism and drug addiction - the addictive sub - personalities in rich young men by means of hypnotism, and was once paid an oil tanker for his work by the family of one such. But to remove ALL the sub - personalities and access the one Soul Personality in Enlightenment requires much more conscious work of the student.
Essence, the soul personality and personality. In order to see clearly the roots of our psychological distortions, Gurdjieff's Fourth Way defines two aspects of the individual: essence and the multitude of fleeting sub - personalities. Essence, the soul personality, is what a person is born with, sub - personalities are that which are acquired, usually by some traumatic event, usually in childhood which splits the childish sub - personality from the Soul stem.
All that is learned, both unconsciously through imitation and through acquired likes and dislikes, constitutes the outer part of the person, that which is changed by outer circumstances. Though personality is necessary, it must not be left to dominate essence or it will produce artificial persons, sub personalities cut off from their true natures, or the soul itself.
"This means that with a quick and early growth of personality, growth of essence can practically stop at a very early age, and as a result we see men and women externally quite grown up, but whose essence remains at the age of ten or twelve." The Energy Enhancement concept of the inner child which needs to be healed before it can grow up.
Through the practice of Energy Enhancement Soul Contact Meditation, we can separate ourselves from the pretenses and imitations which have enslaved us since childhood and return to who we actually are.
Such a return to our essential nature is accompanied by a sense of liberation unlike any other. "To thyself be true" is the first commandment on the way of self-development and the attaining of a higher consciousness.
The fundamental abnormality in human beings lies precisely in the divergence between personality and soul - essence. The more nearly we know ourselves for what we are, the more we approach wisdom.
The more our imagination about ourselves diverges from what we actually are, the more insane we become: Gurdjieff, "Unless a man first finds himself, finds his own essential nature and destiny, and begins from them, all his efforts and achievements will be built only on the sand of personality, and at the first serious shock the whole structure will crumble, perhaps destroying him in its fall."
Examples of shocks are disappointment and bereavement. Only the ego gets hurt. The Soul personality is never affected by disappointment or bereavement. These are two of the tests that this should be so within you!
The soul - essence is the totality of the moments of self-awareness during one's life. Yet moments of higher consciousness are very rare and gone as soon as they come. Once again, the reason such self-consciousness is so difficult to attain is that it is dependent on the conscious use of attention.
Gurdjieff required that each person verify the teachings for themselves based on their personal observations and experiences. That is why he rarely mentioned the idea of "God" even though he called his teaching "esoteric Christianity."
His task was to help people free themselves from all that is false and imaginary in order that they might become receptive to their higher self and enter uncharted dimensions of consciousness on their own through liberation from the tyranny of their ego.
It is for this reason that Gurdjieff was so merciless on his students. He crushed the vanity and artifice of the sub - personalities, mocking those who thought they understood something. As we say in Energy Enhancement, "It is only the ego which gets hurt!"
Gurdjieff differentiated between two forms of knowing: knowledge and understanding. The first is of the head, the second is that which takes root in our being and transforms us. He did indeed humiliate many egos stuffed with pride and broke people's confidence in their own importance.
Gurdjieff tore through our most cherished beliefs with astonishing force and irreverence, stung our vanities with brutal honesty, and called us to that ultimate journey toward the consciousness of who we are and who we are meant to be.
His "toast to the idiots" stung the ego but gave great information to the humble on where to start the spiritual work.
Behind the exotic masks of Gurdjieff, the oriental magician-rogue-teacher, was great compassion. Children and animals sensed it, while seekers of all classes and types found healing and new life from his sometimes bizarre requirements.
Gurdjieff came to wake us with uncompromising affection and assist us accessing our deeper selves. No one walks away unchanged from the teachings of this intense Master who has taught us to discover someone even more elusive than himself: the true nature of our being.
Energy Enhancement is ancient, effective, meditative techniques from 5000 years of successful spiritual technology comprising the Kundalini Kriyas, Soul Contact, the Grounding of Negative Energies and Energy Blockages and sub - personality Inner Children, and more!
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Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com/?Meditation,-Buffers,-Energy-Blockages,-Mechanical-people,-Essence,-Gurdjieff-Part-1-of-2&id=240457] Meditation, Buffers, Energy Blockages, Mechanical people, Essence, Gurdjieff Part 1 of 2
Gurdjieff's Cheek
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=William_Patrick_Patterson]William Patrick Patterson
"I do not pretend to understand George Ivanovitch," said Mme Ouspensky. "For me he is X." It was January 1924 and her husband had just left Gurdjieff. His leaving - with the added admonition to his students forbidding them to see or speak about Mr. Gurdjieff - put into high relief the by-then perennial question: who was Gurdjieff? A great many people have attempted to answer that question, but in many ways he remains, and will continue to remain, X. The reason has to do with scale. Attempts to see him invariably bring him down to the level of the inquiry as well as the inquirer. Factually more is known about Gurdjieff than any of the other seminal spiritual figures, but beyond a certain point one is still left in question. Mme Ouspensky said, "It is useless for us to try to know him," and while in the essential sense that is true, still it is helpful to keep returning to what we do know about Gurdjieff's life, for his life was a living demonstration of one who both embodied and lived the teaching. In doing so - focusing on the facts and applying our reason to the point where intuition speaks - here and there edifying glimpses emerge.
The usual focus is on what an individual does, not what he doesn't do. This is normally passed over, not as the consequence of a conscious decision, but because the focus itself is not considered deeply enough. To know what is left out we must first know what is put in; but we become so focused and entangled with that that the question of what has been left out, what has been denied, never appears.
Greek & Armenian Forebears
A noteworthy example is Gurdjieff's heritage. That his father was Greek, his mother Armenian is well known. We know that his family suffered at the hands of the Turks and Kurds, yet in none of his writings does he ever excoriate them. Nor does he express a personal grief at the murder of his father. Nor does he speak of the genocide of the Armenians, his mother's people. Only when Gurdjieff tells us about the "skeletons" arriving at his door in Essentuki in July 1918, does he give us an idea of what he felt. In February of 1918 he had sent for his family in Alexandropol to come to him in Essentuki to escape the impending Turkish invasion. His mother, brother Dimitri and his wife, younger sister Sophie Ivanovna and her fiance Georgilibovitch Kapanadze came, but Gurdjieff's eldest sister, Anna Ivanovna Anastasieff, had stayed behind in Alexandropol with their father who refused to flee.
That May, with the Turks advancing, she and her husband Feodor and six little children fled, along with twenty-two other relatives, losing their home and homeland, and, cold and hungry, walked on bare feet over tortuous mountains. In mid-July, looking like skeletons, they arrived in Essentuki, bringing the news of the murder of Gurdieff's father by the Turks. Said Gurdjieff, "The enemy, stronger and better armed than their own troops, will inevitably mercilessly and indiscriminately massacre not only the men, but the women, the aged and the children, as was the order of things there."
The only reference Gurdjieff makes to this persecution is in the "Armenian" chapter of Meetings with Remarkable Men. "The Aisors suffered very much in the last war, having been a pawn in the hands of Russia and England, with the result that half of them perished from the vengeance of the Kurds and the Persians...." In this chapter he also speaks of the destruction by invasion and earthquake of Ani, the ancient Armenian city of churches, and then makes a curious statement, that this is the only time he has, or will, "take from information officially recognized on earth."
If we do look at ordinary information, one fact leaps out: after centuries of enduring killings and persecutions by the Turks, Armenians suffered two horrific genocides, the first in 1895 and again in 1915-16, under an official Turkish government policy of annihilation. On April 24, 1915, during World War I, the Armenian Holocaust began. By the time it was over 1.5 million Armenians, 750,000 Assyrians, and 400,000 Greeks had lost their lives.
We know that shortly after the 1915-16 genocide, from March to July 1917, Gurdjieff stayed with his family in Alexandropol and then went to Essentuki. Events of the Russian Revolution worsening, in August 1919 Gurdjieff left his family in Essentuki and undertook the hazardous journey of guiding his students between the Red and White armies and then over the bandit-infested Caucasus mountains. Arriving in Sochi, they took a boat to Poti and then went overland to Tiflis, where they arrived in January 1920. That Easter, Dimitri arrived in Tiflis to say that their mother and sisters and families had survived a harsh winter with famine and typhoid rampant. In June, with the Red Army having conquered the areas north of the Caucasus and threatening to take Georgia, northern Armenia and Azerbaijan, Gurdjieff left for Constantinople, arriving there in early July. Meanwhile, with his mother and family staying on in Essentuki, Anna and her family returned to Armenia. In November 1920, when the Turks once again invaded Armenia, Anna and everyone in her family was killed except a son, Valentin, one of only 30 people who escaped out of 400 villagers.
No Haven in Turkey
In Constantinople, Greeks were only marginally accepted, Armenians not at all. Only five years earlier most Armenians in the city had been sent to concentration camps to die or were taken into the wilderness where they were bludgeoned to death. With what Gurdjieff called the "wiseacring" of the "Young Turks" - Kemal Attaturk and other young military officers and reformers bent on making Turkey a secular state - becoming more virulent, he says that since the situation began "to have a particular smell, I decided - without waiting for the various delights which were bound to develop in connection with these wiseacrings - to get away with my people as quickly as possible, with our skins whole." Leaving for Europe in August 1921, the following year he was able to establish the Institute in France and bring his mother and the remainder of his family to safety.
Years later, when living in France, Gurdjieff said the Armenians were "a wonderful people of great antiquity. They had not let their country be overrun by Western civilization. They had kept up their old customs, particularly the roots of their language, which was full of old sayings, old customs of the past, and this kept their people clean and unspoiled by the slime of the West." Family was important to Gurdjieff, and he understood the objective meaning of war and destruction. No more than alluding to the immense suffering endured by the Armenian people, and the personal suffering he and his family endured, never did Gurdjieff vilify the Turks. In the true Christian meaning, he turned the other cheek. Of this, he said in In Search of the Miraculous:
Let us suppose that a man decides according to the Gospels to turn the left cheek if somebody strikes him on the right cheek. But one 'I' decides this either in the mind or in the emotional center. One 'I' knows of it, one 'I' remembers it - the others do not. Let us imagine that it actually happens, that somebody strikes this man. Do you think he will turn the left cheek? Never. He will not even have time to think about it. He will either strike the face of the man who struck him, or he will begin to call a policeman, or he will simply take to flight. His moving center will react in its customary way, or as it has been taught to react, before the man realizes what he is doing.
Prolonged instruction, prolonged training, is necessary to be able to turn the cheek, and if this training is mechanical - it is again worth nothing because in this case it means that a man will turn his cheek because he cannot do anything else.
Gurdjieff turned the other cheek often in life. As he said many times, "Exterior play a role, interior never."
This can be seen at the time of Gurdjieff's death. When Attaturk and the Young Turks came to power in 1923 they had immediately banned men from wearing the traditional fez, women the veil. Though outwardly he wore western clothes Gurdjieff remained traditional. In 1949, dying of cancer, Gurdjieff was taken on a stretcher from his apartment to the American Hospital. He was sitting up, smoking a cigarette, and on his head he wore a red fez.
Notes
1. I do not pretend. J. G. Bennett, Witness, p. 158.
2. Skeletons. G. I. Gurdjieff, Meetings with Remarkable Men, p. 278.
3. The enemy. Ibid., p. 278.
4. After centuries. Robert D. Kaplan, Eastward to Tartary (New York: Random House, 2000); Christopher J. Walker, Armenia: The Survival of a Nation. rev 2nd ed (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990).
5. Take from. Meetings, p. 88.
6. To have a particular smell. Ibid., p. 283.
7. A wonderful people. Cecil Lewis, All My Yesteryears: An Autobiography (Rockport, Maine: Element, 1993), pp. 174-76.
First printed in The Gurdjieff Journal.
William Patrick Patterson is the author of seven books on The Fourth Way, the latest of which is "Spiritual Survival in a Radically Changing World-Time."
Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com/?Gurdjieffs-Cheek&id=3372060] Gurdjieff's Cheek
03.08.09
Bennett, the will, and the power of attention
Posted in Dramatic Universe at 2:40 pm by nemo
My original idea for a commentary on Bennett isn’t going to happen, as I suspected all along, but it is not necessary in fact to go through the whole thing. A few key ideas for discussion are enough.
One thing that I had wished to indicate is that the core samkhya language taken up by Bennett allows the possibility of a secular ‘spiritual’ psychology, and in general a reminder of the superficiality of most psychological discourse, including that given by most religions.
This material, please note, is not sufistic, or the intellectual property of Gurdjieff. Note that this ‘sufi’ had to appropriate an Indian system, the sufistic being barren, and in the process graft theism onto it. Gurdjieff hid his source, and like a child playing hide and go seek didn’t conceal anything very well, although his followers have tended not to see his game and are set on the wild goose chase of ‘ancient esotericism’ when the core Gurdjieff idea was a concoction of nothing more remarkable than Indic Samkhya.
Bennett sees the game but does something different, and more honest.Bennett performed a great experiment, but the result has failed to estabish itself as a useful resource of psychological understanding and enquiry. That’s not too surprising given the complexity of his formulation.
In any case, it might help if more secular thinkers were aware of the vastness of the human so-called spiritual tradition and of the way in which a post-reductionist psychology can simply bypass the science/religion divide for the noise that it is.
Bennett enters into the spirit of Samkhya to the degree that he doesn’t indulge in speculative theism, referring only to the ‘transfinite’, and in fact he quietly redefines ‘god’ as the third reconciling impulse in every triad, an ingenious way to escape from theological disputes.
There is hardly anything more ingenious than Bennett’s grand cascade of the triads of the will and the relationship of this to man’s all too limited capacities for self-understanding.
The question is, can we truly trust the result here at the fringes of the Gurdjieff/sufi world of dangerous authoritarian figures who would/will attempt to take over this kind of system for their own purposes.
In fact, with a little experience you can use Bennett’s system even better as a skeptic who has graduated from belief in his concoctions: the general drift of his meaning and intent stands out.
Furthermore you will discover that virtually all gurus, sufis, and Gurdjieff types are far too unintelligent to understand any of this, having made up more limited ‘systems’ they can handle, and use to deceive others.
Bennett has stumbled on the general case, the system of systems (where not crap) and this is beyond the capacities of almost everyone. So have fun pulling rank on even the Buddhas, for what it is worth. The point is only that this system of Bennett almost made it: it almost free of the Gurdjieff system. The reason is that Bennett was wide ranging in his studies, and appropriated the Samkhya in his own way. The result is an audacious and interesting experiment.The key to the whole thing is the triad of Beiing, Function, Will, and the introduction of the factor of ‘will’ into psychologies that usually get no further than ‘function’ with occasional notions of being thrown in, and will taken as some kind of functional element.
Bennett’s approach (which resembles that of Schopenhauer, and of course Kant more distantly) grafts the idea of ‘will’ onto the gunas of Samkhya, a brilliant and audacious line of attack.
The result, in volume II, is the magnificent system of cascading triads in the series 1, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96.
We cannot be sure this is ‘the’ right interpretation of the Samkhya set of cosmic laws, but it is certainly a brilliant suggestion, and far better it seems than the decayed thinking about the ‘three gunas’ that we find as the last remains of Samkhya in Indian thought.There is a lot to consider here, but here is a passage from Volume II on attention as a ‘power of the will’./
The point here is the complexity of man’s spiritual (that dumb word again) psychology, and the way in which this transcends the usual debates between religionists and secularists in the raging conflict of science and religion.
Scientific reductionists need a warning of the vast complexity and subtlety of ancient spiritual thought and a sense of the futility of tilting at windmills called the ‘god debate’ etc….This section on the attention rings true in our experience of the most ordinary kind, yet reminds us of the depth behind the simplest of our psychological manifestations.
From The Dramatic Universe, Vol II, page 74-77To find our way through the bewildering maze of theories of the Will, we must turn again to the basic connection between Will and Related¬ness. If Will is the source of all relationships within and beyond Existence, we should be able to discover elements of our experience that have wholly the character of relatedness. Such elements should be neither the terms of a relationship nor the events in which rela¬tionships are manifested; but the very relationship itself. We do not have to seek far, for we find the first such element in the power of attention. It is easy to see that attention is not the doer of our actions. We can act without attention and, when we have the sense of making a voluntary action, we can readily observe that our attention is detached both from the source of the initiative and from the action itself. More¬over, attention is never an action. There is no function of attention. Attention cannot be accounted for in terms of nerve-impulses, although it is undoubtedly a determining factor in deciding how the impulses shall be transmitted. Going further, we can readily establish that attention is not the same as Being. Being cannot fluctuate from moment to moment. It is what it is-the measure of the potentialities latent in a given whole. Even if we ascribe changes in total state to Being and regard their character and range of variation as a test of the quality of Being, we still find that they are not the same as attention. Of all the elements of our experience, attention is pre-eminently that which is evidence in favour of the distinction between voluntary and involuntary
action. Indeed, there are no means of deciding whether a given action is voluntary or involuntary except by observing the attention that precedes and accompanies it. Whatever significance we may attach to the word ‘will’, we can scarcely help associating it with the notion of voluntary as ‘distinct from involuntary actions; and so, here at last, we have found a strong argument for concluding that through the study of attention we coukllearn about the nature of Will.
There arises, however, an obvious question as to the connection between attention and consciousness. We connect consciousness with Being, and we might very well argue that attention is no more than the focussing of consciousness. But focussing a lens is a different act from the passing of light through it. We can, moreover, readily verify from observation that the laws that govern attention are quite different from those that apply to the states of consciousness. For example, attention relates, but consciousness is what it is, in and for itself. Attention can be directed, but consciousness has neither direction nor place. Conscious¬ness is never experienced as voluntary or intentional. Consciousness is a quality of existence. Attention does not exist; it is neither an extensive nor an intensive magnitude. Moreover, it is not rel!lted to sensitivity. In other words, it IS not one of the three states of hyle nor any com¬bination of them.• There is no such thing as ‘energy of attention’. Attention can direct energies, but it is not itself an energy. Conscious¬ness, in all its manifestations, is a form of energy. There are as many levels of consciousness as there are levels of energy. The liberation of energy of a given quality is accompanied by a corresponding state of consciousness, even without the intervention of attention-which often follows rather than precedes the change of consciousness.
Consciousness fluctuates-sometimes under the direction of atten¬tion, sometimes quite independently of it. On the other hand, attention does not necessarily depend upon consciousness. We can readily find examples of unconscious attention-when we perform a series of con¬nected actions that depend upon attention, but where neither the actions themselves nor the attention directing them are in the sphere of our consciousness. – In short, we may say that attention appears to be a power that is neither an activity nor an energy. The word ‘power’ is here to be understood as that which directs energy and activity, but is different (rom either. We have to distinguish between powers that establish relationship-i.e., triads-and forces that pro¬duce action, i.e., dyads. Also a power must be distinguished from a state of being-tetrad-that carries its own form of order and organi-
zation. A power is more abstract than a state of being, but more concrete than a force. These powers are properties of the Will.
The power of choice and the power of decision are. two furt.her properties of the Will that, although closely connected With att~ntlon, are nevertheless distinct from it. These powers are connected with the property we have ~alled ableness-to-be, and we might be tempted to refer all such powers to the hyparchic regulator and, hence, to regard choice as a functional activity. This would strike at the root of any doctrine of Value, for evidently choice and decision would be no more than reflex mechanisms unless they derived from a discrimination of values. We choose that which at the given moment appears to us to be the most ‘worth while’, the most ‘interesting’, the most ‘desirable’; in a word, the most ‘valuable’ course of action. It is precisely because choice and decision are properties of the Will that they can relate us to a system of values. If they were functional only, they could do no more than bind us to facts. This is the argument of Plato’s Gorgias, and it has not been bettered.
Here it is necessary to observe that the powers of attention, choice
and decision are exercised by men far more rarely than might be sup¬posed from the frequency with which they appear i~ discussi?n~ about human behaviour. We do attend, choose and deCide: but It IS very seldom that our choice and our decision are voluntary. On the con¬trary, we have the paradox-contrary to Kant’s supposition-that the Will in man is scarcely ever free, and that the evil state of man results not from choice but from failure to choose. Nearly all that man does is the result of the operation of laws over which he has no control. This is so.mainly because he does not understand them. Only seldom, and then nearly always in trivial situations, do a man’s actions stem from the exercise of his will-power.
The connection between Will as Power and Will as the Principle of Relatedness is not hard to establish. Attention is a relationship, and so are decision and choice. Attention cannot be described as a dyad of ‘observer and observed’, for it is an element that is independent of both and yet relevant to both. The considerations put forwar? in the Introduction regarding the nature of relatedness are exemplIfied in every manifestation of Will.
It remains to consider the connection, traced in Chapter 4, between Will and Understanding. First, we may note that understanding is a relationship, and not an activity nor a state of cons~iousness. Secondly, understanding is effectual only through the exercise of the powers of attention, choice and decision. Unless related by the power of attention, a man’s understanding is useless to him. Unconscious choice is nothing but a change in the direction of functional activity. A decision that is not based upon understanding cannot be ascribed to the Will. These assertions are not self-evident, but they can be verified if we observe that all activity is the operation of laws. It very seldom happens that all the forces at work are contained within a given whole or system. In the case of human activity, a man is acted upon and reacts. Will is then only the operation of laws external to the man’s own conscious¬ness and being. When he understands what is happening in these regions of his being, he acquires the possibility of voluntary action; that is, of bringing the operation of the laws, at least in part, within the sphere of his own will. Thus the powers are present, but the exercise of the powers is possible only if there is understanding. Hence we may conclude-and very naturally-that the subjective aspect of Will con¬sists in the exercise of powers, and that their exercise derives from Understanding.
Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock
Chappell, Vere
Red Wheel/WeiserSex, Magick, Aleister Crowley, Orgasms, Erotic Dances, Angelic Beings, Revolutionary Activism, Liberation, Persecution, Defiance, and Suicide.
Persecuted by Anthony Comstock and his Society for the Suppression of Vice, this turn-of-the-century heroine was also a spiritualist who learned many secrets of high magick through her claimed wedlock to an angelic being. Born in Philadelphia in 1857, Ida Craddock became involved in occultism around the age of thirty. She attended classes at the Theosophical Society and began studying a tremendous amount of materials on various occult subjects. She taught correspondence courses to women and newly married couples to educate them on the sacred nature of sex, maintaining that her explicit knowledge came from her nightly experiences with an angel named Soph. In 1902, she was arrested under New York's anti-obscenity laws and committed suicide to avoid life in an asylum. Now for the first time, scholar Vere Chappell has compiled the most extensive collection of Craddock's work including original essays, diary excerpts, and suicide letters--one to her mother and one to the public.
Price: $21.95
The Book of Symbols: Reflections On Archetypal Images
Taschen, Benedikt
Taschen AmericaThe Book of Symbols combines original and incisive essays about particular symbols with representative images from all parts of the world and all eras of history. The highly readable texts and almost 800 beautiful full-color images come together in a unique way to convey hidden dimensions of meaning. Each of the c. 350 essays examines a given symbol's psychic background, and how it evokes psychic processes and dynamics. Etymological roots, the play of opposites, paradox and shadow, the ways in which diverse cultures have engaged a symbolic image -- all these factors are taken into consideration.
Price: $39.99
Gurdjieff in the Public Eye: Newspaper Articles, Magazines and Books 1914-1949
Taylor, Paul Beekman
Eureka EditionsThe history of Gurdjieff in newspaper articles, magazines, and books during his lifetime traces his public reputation in what is said of him on the world stage. Some of the writers were reporters, others followers and visitors to the Institute, and still others were persons intrigued by social and religious fads of the day. Many of the newspaper reports written by journalists, who had never seen his demonstrations nor listened to him or his followers, pandered to readers intrigued by scandal and the sensational by inventing stories about him and his activities.
Nonetheless, the articles printed between 1914 and 1949, the year of his death constitute a topical history of his life and his work in a running account of Gurdjieff's changing public image as a man and a teacher, and provide an insight into the way his teaching was perceived from an age in which theosophy was a prevalent intellectual occupation.
Many of those whose words appear here were leading figures in the intellectual and cultural life of their age, among them the editor A. R. Orage, writer Katherine Mansfield, theosophist and actress Maude Hoffman, actress Georgette Leblanc, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, critic Denis Saurat, literary historians Waldo Frank and Gorham Munson, Hollywood screen writer Nunnally Johnson, and Clifford Sharp, the founder and editor of the influential English New Statesman.
Price: $36.00
Quadrivium: The Four Classical Liberal Arts of Number, Geometry, Music, & Cosmology (Wooden Books)
Lundy, Miranda
Walker & CompanyThe quadrivium -- the classical curriculum -- comprises the four liberal arts of number, geometry, music, and cosmology. It was studied from antiquity to the Renaissance as a way of glimpsing the nature of reality. Geometry is number in space; music is number in time; and cosmology expresses number in space and time. Number, music, and geometry are metaphysical truths: life across the universe investigates them; they foreshadow the physical sciences.
Quadrivium is the first volume to bring together these four subjects in many hundreds of years. Composed of six successful titles in the Wooden Books series:
it makes ancient wisdom and its astonishing interconnectedness accessible to us today. Beautifully produced in six different colors of ink, Quadriviumwill appeal to anyone interested in mathematics, music, astronomy, and how the universe works.
- Sacred Geometry
- Sacred Number
- Harmonograph
- The Elements of Music
- Platonic & Archimedean Solids, and
- A Little Book of Coincidence
Price: $20.00
Legends of the Fire Spirits: Jinn and Genies from Arabia to Zanzibar
Lebling, Robert
When Westerners think of a genie, the first image that comes to mind may be Barbara Eden in her pink harem pants or the illuminated blue buffoon from the animated Disney film Aladdin. But to the people of the Arab and Islamic worlds, the picture is dramatically different. Legends of the Fire Spirits looks beyond Westernized caricatures to immerse the reader in the vibrant lore of the jinn -- the wondrous, often troublesome, and sometimes terrifying spirit beings of ancient Arab and Islamic tradition.Robert Lebling delves into long-lost accounts, medieval histories, colonial records, anthropologists reports, and travelers tales to explore the origin and evolution of legends that continue to thrive in the Middle East and beyond. He cuts through centuries of Orientalists cultural presumption to craft a study that stands apart from the overwhelming body of literature concerned with religion in the Middle East.
A captivating synthesis of history and folklore, this is the most diverse collection of jinn lore ever assembled in one volume. From ancient scriptures to The Arabian Nights and beyond, and with a foreword by acclaimed filmmaker Tahir Shah, Lebling has constructed a comprehensive account that not only transcends geographical borders but also spans some four millennia.
Price: $16.95
Witch Eye #16: A Journal of Feri Uprising!
Faerywolf, Storm (ed)
FaeryWolfWitch Eye: A Journal of Feri Uprising is a quality, print journal with full color covers published once per year, full of art, articles, spells, and lore inspired by the F(a)eri(e) tradition, meaning various permutations of the branch of traditional witchcraft passed down from the teachings of Victor & Cora Anderson, and Gwydion Pendderwen. While much of our focus is rooted in the Feri tradition, we also offer many items of interest to any Pagan or Witch.
In this issue:
- Cora Anderson: A Community Remembers our F(a)eri(e) Grandmother
- Drawing from the Wells of Creation: The Goddesses of the Primal Elements by Storm Faerywolf
- A Feri Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram by Valerie Walker
- Shiva: Creator, Dancer, and Destroyer by Abel Gomez
- Alchemical Feri by Ravyn Stanfield
- Feri Faeries? by StarChild
Price: $15.00
June 1936—Constant suffering. A painful period. Have at last found a flat in the Rue
Casimir-Périer, between the church and the trees.
A wonderful end to the month because of my recent meeting with Gurdjieff. He has
been living in Paris for some time and I decided to say to him: “Time is passing and I
am making no progress. I haven’t much longer to live. Will you let me read the new
parts of your manuscript?” He looked at me for a long time and at last he said: “You
still have time to live. Yes, come to lunch tomorrow and you shall read.”
He murmured something that I couldn’t understand. At length I grasped it: “Liver out
of order. All organs clogged.” Again he looked at me for a long time, and he then said:
“Yes, I will do it for you.”
I wanted to cry out my thanks, but I knew that I should keep calm, that he would
understand me. With difficulty I got out: “Thank you.”
I lunched with him and his family and a few pupils. After lunch he fetched this
manuscript and showed me a cupboard in a small room next to the dining room. He
would leave it there for me, and I could come and read whenever I liked.
So I go there nearly every day. I read with concentration, as though my life depends on
the difficult thought to be gleaned from those pages.
https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/content_detail_path?id=40246222&se...
He was in a freak car accident that gave him much physical suffering for the rest of his life.
He did not speak, but first used a board with alphabet characters, and later simply used sign language that others would interperet.
Some more thoughts about this for you.
Also,you are welcome to laugh at us.
Before you click the arrow, note the lady that Meher Baba is holding by the shoulders, watch her as the video clip progresses, it is almost as though she is drunk. He is very likely infusing her with the energy of his higher centers. He has learned to live normally with this energy and level of perception. It was not always so. See how she looks drunk, or in divine ecstasy. There is teaching going on here. Look also at the others around him in the clip from which the still is taken, their faces are alight. Meher said to one of his students, "You are one of mine now". People wrote that when he walked into one of the huge tents, filled with hundreds of people, the atmosphere changed.
In India, he is likely forgotten, or not know at all.
We have it on very good authority, that this is an awakened man.
Meher Baba passed on in 1969. He was actually Iranian.
See how the faces around him light up.
Mr. Gurdjieff followed the way of blame, attracting difficulties to himself.
Meher Baba followed the way of love, still very difficult.
If you see some of the books of black and white photos, he drove himself relentlessly. Occasionaly, when he came out of meditation he was extremely exhausted and bedraggled looking. When asked, he said that he was working on world affairs, China, Russian and others, working through his astral body.
See the look in his eyes.
He would go to cinemas to work on healing the people while their attention was on the screen. He would help them grow. Rodney Collin described the higher body of man as having some of the same properties as scent. Able to fill a room, seep under doors. But the esoteric economy of many of these men, is that they give themselves almost unsparingly to the growth of others.
They are doing God's work.
Mr. Gurdjieff once said: "God helps me".
