This Fundamental Quest, Henriette Lannes
Mme Lannes: “It is difficult to be serious. Our experiences still don’t have enough weight because we don’t manage to extract ourselves from habitual fantasies. Too many surface things distract us. Our lives are spent in a state of distraction. How can a real human being emerge from that? The question must be asked: What do I want? It’s clear to me that to exist in a state of distraction is not living but pretending to live…
“What I see everywhere is that the Work isn’t taken seriously enough. We have time, and we allow ourselves to waste it.” …”As soon as the Work is set aside and judged to be not so very necessary, everything falls apart. The inner light goes out. …”
“If we could see all this, we would see the basis of our mechanicality, we would see our complicity with it, and see as well that our inner passivity has always been complicit. It would be a serious effort for us to see this passivity every day, …and to see that once we have received an impression we respond mechanically through one of our imaginary ÔI’s’, which we have perhaps already seen in action. Rather, let’s say glimpsed in action, because had we seen it, in the strong sense of the word, it might already have been eliminated.
Transcripts of Gurdjieff’s Meetings 1942-1946
Meeting 28
Mme D: I do not understand how it is possible to remember oneself in life. Already in self-remembering under the best conditions, in stopping myself, in quieting myself—I reach with so much difficulty such a little thing—that I can say I never remember myself in life. …
Mme D: But how to remember oneself since even in the best conditions I do not achieve it?
Gurdjieff: The worse the conditions the better the result. It is for this that one must do. Do not consider the conditions; consider the moment of decision. At each of the three hours, you absolutely must remember yourself. You enter into yourself; you feel that you exist with all your presence and this—this is your task. Afterwards you break it all. One cannot always self-remember. What counts is to do it consciously. With an automatic decision that is worth nothing.
Mme D: I do not understand, Monsieur, … I have done it like that.
Gurdjieff: Your decision is not strong. You must decide many things. You must put yourself in a quiet state—relaxed—and in this state settle your task. You try it. Ten times, a hundred times, you fail. You continue. You take trouble. Little by little you train yourself and you achieve it. But not in one effort. This is a very little thing; and it is the most important. Remember yourself consciously. Consciously. That is to say, by your own decision. To remember oneself and at the same time, collect oneself together, to penetrate deeply into one’s very self—these then are the conditions. If you cannot continue for a long time, try it for a short time. …
Mme D: Why? I do not succeed, Mr. Gurdjieff. …
Gurdjieff: You do it badly. Do this in the same way that you have given yourself your promise to be here at seven o’clock. This is an example. If you do not do it like this it has no value at all. Give yourself your promise and do. You give yourself your promise in this way to remember yourself at a certain moment.
Mme D: I do it like this, but I act automatically. My decision is automatic. I do not succeed in feeling like a human being.
Gurdjieff: You must do an exercise to be more collected. Learn to collect yourself. Choose a good moment that seems propitious. Sit down. Let nobody disturb you. Relax yourself. All your attention— all your will is concentrated on your relaxation. You quieten your associations. After—only after, you begin to think.
Mme D: Yes. I try like that and I do not succeed.
Gurdjieff: Wait. Do not disturb me—do not interrupt me. You have never done like this. Your explanations prove it to me. After, when you have quietened your associations, only then, begin the exercise—consciously, with all your attention, all your faculties.
You represent to yourself that you are surrounded by an atmosphere. Like the earth, man also has an atmosphere, which surrounds him on all sides, for a metre, more or less—to a limit. In the atmosphere the associations, in ordinary life the thoughts—produce waves. It concentrates at certain places—it recedes; it has movements according to the direction which you impart to it. This depends on the movement of your thought. Your atmosphere is displaced in the direction in which your thought goes. If you think of your mother, who is far away your atmosphere moves towards the place where your mother is. When you do this exercise, you represent to yourself that this atmosphere has limits. For example one metre and a half, shall we say. Then you concentrate all your attention on preventing your atmosphere from escaping beyond the limit. You do not allow it to go further than one metre or one metre and a half. When you feel your atmosphere quietened, without waves, without movement, then with all your will you suck it into yourself—you conserve yourself in this atmosphere. You draw it consciously into yourself. The more you can, the better it is. To start with, it is very tiring.
That is how one must do the exercise. Afterwards you rest yourself—you send the exercise to the devil. …This exercise is done especially to allow one to have a collected state. … It is difficult to penetrate into yourself at the first effort. One must compel the atmosphere to remain within its limits—not allow it to go further than it should. … This exercise I have given to everybody. No one has understood what is collectedness, nor given it attention. …It is the first exercise for remembering oneself.
Henri Tracol – from a meeting, June 6, 1964, Paris.
Translated from French by D.M. Dooling & Patty de Llosa.
On the hanging suspended above the students’ heads in the Study House (at the Institute), Mr. Gurdjieff had written this aphorism, among others: “Always remember that here the work is a means, and not an end.” To encourage a false mystique of the work in myself and in others does injury to the very essence of our search. It substitutes a mental or emotional image which is, at the very least, suspect. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I think it’s a danger that lies in wait for us all.
One of its chief characteristics is to turn us away from life, to invite us to treat life with contempt, to consider it the beast we must vanquish or the enemy we must overcome. As if the work could be in any way against life! That would mean forgetting, among other things, why the day came when we turned towards this teaching. Whatever form our dissatisfactions and hopes took, we came to the work asking, above all, for help to live this life, help to recover a more real, more convincing, meaning for it. And that’s what we discard when we give way to an image born of experiences that are still fragmentary and hopes that are not yet legitimateÉ
Views from the Real World
Essence and Personality
If you want “to know America” you must imprint it on your memory. Sitting in your room you will not see anything: you should observe in life. In your room you cannot develop the master. A man may be strong in a monastery, but weak in life, and we want strength for life. For instance, in a monastery, a man could be without food for a week, but in life he cannot be without food even for three hours. What then is the good of his exercises?
In Search of the Miraculous
Chapter 2
…”On the fourth way it is possible to work and to follow this way while remaining in the usual conditions of life, continuing to do the usual work, preserving former relations with people, and without renouncing or giving up anything. On the contrary, the conditions of life in which a man is placed at the beginning of his work, in which, so to speak, the work finds him, are the best possible for him… These conditions are natural for him. These conditions are the man himself, because a man’s life and its conditions correspond to what he is. Any conditions different from those created by life would be artificial for a man, and in such artificial conditions the work would not be able to touch every side of his being at once.
Transcripts of Gurdjieff’s Meetings 1942-1946
Meeting 6
Gurdjieff: He who works becomes an actor, a real actor in life. To be an actor is to play a role. Life is a theatre where every man plays a role. Every day they change it. Today one role, tomorrow another role. He only is a good actor who is able to remember himself and consciously play his role, no matter what it may be.
An: But how does one know the role one must play?
Gurdjieff: You speak with Boussique—you know who she is, how one must be with her, what she likes. Well then do it. Interiorly she is nothing for me, she is merde for me. She likes people to kiss her hand; I do it because she likes that. I am kind to her. Interiorly I want to insult her, but I don’t do it. I play my role. So then she becomes my slave. Interiorly I don’t react.
The Reality of Being
135. Watchfulness is our real aim
…Watchfulness is our real aim. If we work alone or together without inner watchfulness, it is of no use—we will be taken by one thing or another. …At the same time, I wish to go toward life and, in so doing, to lose myself. Yes, I wish to lose myself. But I do not know what it means. I always think that it is some evil identification that takes me, this awful life that takes me. But it is not true. I go toward it. There is something I like in it. Yet I do not know why. And I have to see that this is an essential question—it is me after all, not something outside. …
How can I live this opening to the one reality and at the same time be in front of life and live my life? …The obstacle is that my mind is occupied all the time. It is not enough to notice this once and for all. I have to live it as my truth until all my thoughts, emotions and actions can be held under my attention without excluding or condemning anything. For this I need a certain inner space and an attention that is free. It is only in a state of free attention that true seeing can appear.