UFOs and spaceships in the 1930's

When Mr. Gurdjieff wrote his book "Beelzebub's Tales", it was based in a Spaceship.

This was written before the second world war.

 

There is life on other planets, you may incarnate into a lifetime on another planet

at some point in your growth, but likely, they will be subject to the same drives and vices for

power, reproduction, resources and dominance as on this planet.

 

Don't worry about it, the earth is one of the worst places on the universe.

All the suffering of this life, means inner growth is possible.

 

Meher Baba said that "This earth is a nursery for spirits".

 

You are in the right place, right time, and right century for your evolution.

This was all designed for you to grow.

Formatory Mind

Mr. Gurdjieff explained formatory mind.

People "know" anything, anyhow.

 

We use canned phrases, "Hello, how are you?"

"Hi, How's it going?", "Have a nice day!".

"Giving it 110%", "The war on drugs", "The war on terrorism".

Apparent thought, but without real thinking.

 

Particularly, the last two statements are representative of the

form thinking that is used by government media propaganda.

How much truth is there? How much do these phrases hide?

 

The golden rule is stated as "Treat others as you would like to be treated".

A teacher treats his students with respect to their development,

he gives more than is asked, he treats them not as they are,

but as they are going to be. He gives almost his all.

 

Fritz Peters, when he returned to see Mr. Gurdjieff during the war,

said he had never seen anybody look so tired. Mr. Gurdjieff pushed

himself relentlessly to help his students, transmit the work.

 

And to strive to be the words he taught.

 

Changes

Mr. Gurdjieff and Mr. Ouspenky appeared at a moment when civilization was encroaching on the ancient world.

The movement of the Industrial Revolution and the advancement of science had irreversibly changed the agricultural civilization

that had been mankind's form of living for thousands of years.

 

Mr. Gurdjieff found this startling: "Imagine, young boy of nine

now reads a newspaper!" he said, news from across the world was now available to cultures that were living as they were in

biblical times.

 

In the last hundred years, we have gone from horse and cart, to cars, formula one races, 4x4, moon landings, ipods,

Facebook, Twittering, emailing, international air travel, infra red cameras catching criminals from helicopters, instantaneous stock trading, and events like a Royal Wedding being projected to billions of people around the world.

 

Do not get lost in this world, the sacred world of the self, is what will survive when this is all gone.

The world of modern civilization, is just the current test in your development.

Do not lose yourself in this world. Find yourself in it. Say "I am" every hour.

 

The crowd

Thank you for all your kind comments.

 

The crowd neither wants nor seeks knowledge, and the leaders of the crowd, in their own interests, try to strengthen its fear and dislike of everything new and unknown. The slavery in which mankind lives is based upon this fear.

The crowd neither wants nor seeks knowledge, and the leaders of the crowd, in their own interests, try to strengthen its fear and dislike of everything new and unknown. The slavery in which mankind lives is based upon this fear.

Mr. Gurdjieff as quoted by Mr. Ouspensky  from "Fragments of an unknown teaching".

 

To our real growth.

A friend in the work

Sweets

Mr. Gurdjieff always carried sweets for children in his pockets.

These were a rare and special treat after the war.

He would reprimand parents who tried to make their children say

a mechanical "Thankyou". He saw that the parents, even unconsciously,

were already handing their child a "mask" of personality.

Making the child a functioning, well-behaved robot, his task was to make people free.

He especially loved children and animals,

Listen to self

A pupil once asked Gurdjieff why he tolerated so many visitors that were

pretentious and false at the teaching dinners he held in his Paris apartment after the war.

He replied that (1949), there are radios, movies, advertising, all drowning

out and overwhelming that in us which is real.

"I teach such people to listen to self, I only one that can teach such"

Jumping the stream.

The system gives us a vast cosmology,

but at certain point, the novelty of it all goes out the window.

 

You have to work.

 

You cannot go to seminars forever, you have to jump the stream to grow.

Small things.

Mr. Gurdjieff said, "Sometimes this life is objectively good".

 

Actually, this exists in every moment, that you can remember to

be there for your life.

 

It is not easy to do, he said: "Say I am (be to your life) every hour".

 

Timescales

Back to our earlier post about the 2000's.

Your action today, is reflected against this civilisation of which you are a part.

Your community, your lifetime, your scale of developing lifetimes.

These tests today, were meant to be, you are meant to learn something from today.

Mr. Gurdjieff said: "Patience is the mother of will".

Say "I am" once every hour. If not today, when?

Your best

Feel abandoned?

In your work, sometimes you may feel that you are trudging

on a difficult and lonely path, but this situation was created for you

to learn to walk on your own. To create strength in you.

It is not pleasant, but this is a neccessary law.

Sometimes it may break you. What recovers and comes back

to normality, will be wiser and stronger. No one can do it all.

Be at peace when you have done your best.

Accept

Your race is with no one else but yourself.

Your mistakes, have been made, this was meant to be.

There is a third place, acceptance, your day is now.

Be grateful for your friends, your place you live, a cup of coffee.

This can be a big thing.

We are the most..

It seems that even in this decade, we are different people now

as the race of humanity, than at the dawn of the year 2000.

This is a bit self obvious, what we mean is, life is faster, more gadgets,

more pollution, more money, more media, more electronics, more news,

more people, (if you live in a city), higher prices, less food, more unemployment,

more crashing economies, (Greece, UK, USA), more revolution (Arab Spring).

Relationships are faster, less stable, everyone wants your money.

We are aware, this is a broad generalization.

But all this, makes it possible to work, but you have to work harder.

 

Effort

We just found a wonderful thought from Mr. Gurdjieff.

He told a student before sitting down to dinner.

"Before you eat, work".

Make an effort.

He would sometimes not eat his favourite dish at mealtime

because he had not accomplished a certain task he had set himself.

"Because I do not merit it".

Hitler

Hitler said: "I play my role with the timing and precision of a sleepwalker".

 

Here is a man who unleashed the most powerful and destructive energies on the planet.

 

How could he ever work off the karmic suffering he caused?

 

Referencing our earlier post, the most famous and infamous, are sometimes, the most trapped.

Mirrors

It is important to put yourself in some kind of group work.

Even if it is a volunteer position somewhere.

 

It is said that the eyes are the windows to the soul.

Other people are the mirrors in which we see ourselves.

 

Mr. Ouspensky said that "other people are as important as the system".

Mr.Ouspensky said that there are different levels of people alive on the planet.

Mr.Ouspensky said that there are different levels of people alive on the planet.

We will paraphrase.

 

There are the great mass of people, who recur, they have children, raise their families,

they may be drafted into the army, there may be a few major events in their lives.

Political upheaval, perhaps a geographic cataclysm like an earthquake, or a flood.

They cultivate, and live the life of "normal" people. 9-5, etc, they live in "the mass".

 

There are people that have an effect on humanity, presidents, kings, celebrities,

famous people, artists. These could be people like Mozart, Picasso,

Bill Clinton, Obama, Ronald Reagan, Queen Elizabeth, Louis X!V of France, Bill Gates, Donald Trump,

people who start companies like Facebook, Google, Mohamed Ali the boxer, Martin Luther King.

 

They play a "big" role in life, we know who they are, they leave a legacy, millions of people know

about them, use their product, watch them on television, visit where they once lived, they have an effect on civilization.

 

They can make a speech or a decision, that can affect multitudes of people.MLK, "I have a dream" speech is world famous.

Picasso altered the course of modern art for example. They have a certain kind of perfection about them.

 

They have played this role before, it has been said of Mozart for example, that his manuscripts have minimal

corrections, in the movie "Amadeus", he describes composing as the music coming through his mind onto the paper.

 

They accomplish things fast, they have powerful energy. Mozart lived only into his thirties.

Alexander the Great built the largest empire of the then known world by the age of 26, by the age of 21, it is said that

Picasso was painting three pictures a day. The music that Jimi Hendrix is most famous for, was produced in about

three and half years, Van Gogh's whole career was about seven years, half of which was spent purely drawing.

In the last seventy days of his life, he painted a picture a day, it is estimated.

 

There are men who have an influence that is downright destructive, they live to conquer, dominate, destroy.

Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Stalin, Napoleon, Mussolini, men who care nothing of the suffering of others.

Napoleon said, "I can spend thirty thousand men a month". He could lose a thousand men a day in battle,

and not be perturbed by this apparently.

 

There are people who are descending through lifetimes, people who have self destructive or self damaging behaviour,

addicts, prostitutes, tramps, alcoholics, degenerate gamblers, people locked in criminal energies.

 

There are people who are evolving, people working their evolution through an accelerated pace, under the guidance

of a teacher, following a system of awakening, such as the Fourth Way.

 

It is all in balance, from the top, to the bottom.

 

 

Other people

Mr. Ouspensky said: "Other people, are as important as the system".

They make it possible to work, otherwise, it would be just words.

The obstacles and hindrances on our paths, make it possible to grow.

Group work

Students of the work come together in groups,

there is friction. Someone takes your tool, someone pushes into a line.

Someone is late or lazy, or eyes your girlfriend or wife.

 

Someone just antagonizes you, or evokes your empathy.

You don't like their hair, their accent, the way they wear their clothes,

they are "too vain", "too proud", aggressive, pushy, moody, intolerant.

Grabby or greedy.

 

You of course, are near perfect, and have no faults :)

 

You have to expose yourself to this discomfort.

The promise of the work, is that if you participate in the work of groups,as

Mr. Ouspensky said, "the one promise I will make, is that if you

do this work long enough, you will see yourself"

Do you think...

Do you think that you can change without effort?

Well, the answer is yes and no.

Sometimes the effort is to keep one's mouth shut, and be patient.

Purification is happening. It is a passive effort.

Sometimes, you have to be the one who volunteers to do the dishes

at the end of dinner when no one else wants to.

 

It has been said, that we fall in love when we are apart.

 

The time you make an effort, lets say, to take care of someone's cat while they are away,

may be the most rewarding effort of all, breaking a pattern when it is

so easy to say "NO", instead, you act positively, give of yourself,

and something good will come.

 

Mr. Gurdjieff said, the energy of a conscious effort is rewarded sometime

in the future.

Efforts

One of the things we need to do to get anywhere with our personal growth,

is to stay focused on our goals.

Small daily efforts are the key.

Otherwise we repeat our journey through the same groove.

We must change, but in small ways, with real efforts one at a time.

Payment

Mr. Gurdjieff's niece said that her uncle would dissappear for years at a time,

then turn up at the family doorstep in rags, completely penniless.

He woud stay for a while, rebuild, they would give him money and clothes,

he would then take off on his search again.

 

He made a tremendous payment to bring this sacred knowledge to the west.

Noticing.

Just look around you, take in the people around you.

Look at a tree, the sky, a bird in your garden.

Smell, sense, taste your food, be present.

 

This is your life. Not tomorrow, not yesterday.

 

Now

Small aims

You can make a small aim every day,

trying to accomplish it can build will.

 

Harder, ask a friend who knows you well to make

the aim for you.

 

It could be to smile, or be kind to another.

More thoughts on the Pharoah

We would like to add more on Egyptian art, mentioned in the previous post.

These artifacts were created in a world that did not have television, movies, ipods, or the internet.

Honest! :)

They were a way of communicating with people on one level.

Men lived lives of barter, labour, effort. They generally did not live as long as we do now.

 

When a man saw a statue of a King or a Pharaoh, or a Warrior in the ancient world,

it represented a standard that all men could aspire to.

 

Think about the Cobra and the Vulture on the forehead of a statue of a Pharoah.

Visualize these figures on your own forehead. Their function, emulate the gaze of the Pharaoh,

the calm, the centredness. The statues in Egyptian art represent another level of being.

 

They are conscious, objective art, from School. Gifts from another age.

To learn more..

At one point, things became very "flat" for Mr. Ouspensky.

Mr. Gurdjieff told him that he had forgotten one very important thing.

"To learn more, you have to teach". It is a law, you have to put someone in

your place in the work.

 

When a man starts to work on himself, he feels he must have no less than Jesus Christ.

It is however sufficient, to have someone pointing the way who was just standing where

you are right now. Part of the esoteric economy.

We tend to be very vain to think we deserve so much. This is part of what has to go.

What exactly was meant by....

A friend asked "What exactly did Mr. Gurdjieff mean by this work is going against God?"

 

We won't presume of course to "interpret the Master". but will offer this.

 

Mr. Gurdjieff said that people pray to God, but if you take a spoon of water, your relationship

 

to the microbes in that water is similar to the relationship of the Absolute (God, The Creator)

 

to humanity. The whole world is a gigantic mechanical mechanism.

 

 

Everything you see is a machine, a mechanism, evolved to function mechanically over many thousands

 

and millions of years.  The system teaches that no one is "doing anything".

 

The very best illustration of this in western literature, may be Mr. Ouspensky's profound observation that he was walking along

 

remembering himself, he went into a shop, and woke up two hours later, realizing that he had been in

 

a hypnotic trance (our usual state), he had performed countless actions in this state, ordered cigarettes, taken a carriage,

 

etc, etc. This is man's state. To even be present, to not express negativity, not to hate, to make efforts

 

to observe oneself and behave differently under the lens of the work, is to not be part of the mechanical

 

level of life on earth for split seconds at a time.

 

Look at your local nightly news, that is the level of man currently.

 

Stand in a busy railway station, or a cafe, and observe the masses of people, boys look at girls,

 

girls look at boys, businessmen read newspapers, eat, drink, laugh.

 

They react and obey mechanical "I"s, there is no effort in this. Remember a man may work hard physically,

 

it is not necessarily the work, it is sparking the ray of consciousness inside, that is the work.

 

God created the world to be "as it is", a medium of struggle for ascending spirits.

 

This work is about escaping this level, it is work both "against God", at the same time,

 

it is "For God", because escaped spirits help others heal and grow spiritually, which helps the absolute.

 

There is more, because every soul is on a ladder of evolution, someone needs to step into Mr. Gurdjieff's place,

 

so he can move to his next step. It does not stop. We will add more on this later, it is a big question.

 

Thankyou for your interest.  It is fine to ask questions.

Only observe

When you make efforts to see your self functioning mechanically,

do not try to change anything.

Mr. Gurdjieff said that: "If change, will only see change".

Real change of oneself takes a long time, a long period of observations without

expecting results. Later efforts will adjust to understanding, and you can make

adjustments. Self-observation is data, real data, efforts, going against the machine,

is creating data for the "third world". He said that this "will make you rich for life".

Objective riches. 

Going into the beyond

You actually do something very big when you confront a habit

or weakness with understanding.

Mr. Gurdjieff advised us that:"This work is against God".

You were meant to be how you are without change.

The work brings the possibility of real change.

Be kind to yourself

Mr. Gurdjieff said that: "only super efforts count".

People often think that this is an effort of extreme physical effort.

Days without sleep, or long hours digging or exercising.

People in the work have damaged themselves following this line of effort.

Don't.

Although there are times when this may be useful, employing the way of the Fakir.

 

He was really referring to the kind of efforts that "go beyond"  one's comfort.

When the machine thinks it has done enough for the day, wash the dishes,

tidy your room for ten minutes. Be kind, be aware.

Make an effort for your group.

Go further than you normally would comfortably.

This also makes energy.

Be kind to yourself, awakening is not a muscular effort.

 

The delicacy of the excuse

The work consists in being slowly backed into a corner, until the only option available,

is the make the effort to grow.

This is why the work is difficult, our human bodies and psychologies make every effort to

deviate, diffuse, avoid, excuse, run, hide, anything, to not make the one effort that needs to be done.

Rodney Collin said: "The delicacy of the excuse, is not taken into account".

Naturally quieter

Through work, injecting consciousness into our life,

the long body becomes revealed.

This takes years, to shine light, and put a picture together of how our totality functions.

It is a humbling experience. You become naturally quieter.

Then more accepting, and forgiving. This takes time.

Mr. Gurdjieff was described as a "monster of humility".

When you around such men, you shut up, because they reveal your false self to you too.

Each of us

Each of us has a fault running through us, the core of our personalities.

Mr. Gurdjieff called this "Chief Weakness".

It is the basis of who the false self is founded upon.

Mr. Ouspensky said the Chief Weakness is our emotional attitude towards ourself.

 

It is the part we cannot admit. Our "dark room".

Efforts of will build magnetism

Mr. Gurdjieff said that efforts of will build magnetism, the ability to "do".

Being by doing something small.

Sit slightly differently in your chair, say hi to someone at work that you would

normally avoid. Adjust your environment slightly.

Thomas de Hartman said in his wonderful book, that in the early days as they were

escaping the revolution they stayed at a house. Mr. Gurdjieff would have his students

re-arrrange the furniture every few days, so that the house never quite became too

comfortable.

Now

Mr. Gurdjieff said, "One must rid oneself of the disease of tomorrow".

Ever hear yourself whine?

Losers whine.

Actually, let us examine this, when things go wrong, we avoid, we excuse ourselves,

the effort must be made now. The work is about building being in the moment.

There is nowhere else.

Epictetus said: "The present is the only thing of which man can truly be deprived".

An effort of will, is available to you, somehow simply, now.

Friendship

The soul grows through smiles, friendship, presence.

His students said that Mr. Gurdjieff was a great friend.

And never petty.

Soul

It is good to keep a sense of humour about oneself.

It is all too easy to keep on one's "meeting face", and look serious.

Nothing at this level is real. Example; when a father realizes that he missed

something really important, like watching his children growing up, while he works ninety

hours a week. The real stuff should be joyful. Soul food.

Being present, is builiding a soul.

Most important.

The next step after beginning to develop some attention in the body,

is to start becoming aware of the emotional self. Your negative thinking,

imagination, anger, lack of acceptance of others. The newspapers are full of

negative events and energy. It is the level of being of man on this planet.

Mr. Gurdjieff said that "everything happens".

Try to step out through your front door with the left foot instead of the right foot.

Try to hold your coffee with your left hand and not your right.

Try to break a pattern. No one is doing anything, it all happens.

To understand this, is a very big thing indeed.

 

Obama, Cameron, Clinton, Kennedy, Trump, Sugar, Murdoch, Gates, Ballmer, Jobs,

Blatter, Gaddaffi, Hussein, Napoleon, Hitler, Churchill, Picasson, Matisse, Nixon.

 

Think of them trying to make a small change in their day.

They all have had influence over big events, but the small events are the real way out.

 

It is estimated that in total, Mr. Gurdjieff worked with only about one thousand people

during his whole teaching. Yet, it might be argued, he was the most important person

of the last century. Because the most important thing of all, is what is left when your

life is over.

Hugs to our friends in the work.

Small effort

The Fourth Way begins with sensing the body, building awareness of

one's sensory self. Mr. Gurdjieff gave Mr. Ouspensky an exercise to start by

sensing the nose, then the ear, then the foot, then the hand, and so on, rotating

through various parts of the body. Look at the people around you on the bus, or

in traffic. Are any of them doing this?

It is a small but profound effort.

Leverage

When bad things, or unpleasant things happen to you.

Try for a moment, to see them as help.

A struggle, something overcome, is growth.

An unpleasant person endured, builds being.