Views From the Real World
New York, February 24, 1924 – Man is subject to many influences.
Chemico-physical influences and associative influences come from things that are near to us. But there are also other influences which come from big things, from the earth, from the planets and from the sun, where laws of a different order operate…
…Always everything influences us. Every thought, feeling, movement is a result of one or another influence. Everything we do, all our manifestations are what they are because something influences us from without. …We may want to get free from one or two, but having got free of them we may acquire another ten.
…Everything is mechanical.
… As a rule, at every moment of our life only one center works in us… By itself a center has no consciousness, no memory; it …merely possesses a special capacity of recording.
Indeed it greatly resembles …a recording tape. If I say something to it, it can later repeat it. It is completely mechanical, organically mechanical. All centers differ slightly as to their substance, but their properties are the same.
…Our mind has no critical faculty in itself, no consciousness, nothing. And all the other centers are the same.
…In the majority of cases each center lives its own life. It believes everything it hears, without criticism, and records everything as it has heard it. …(I)t believes everything…
…If you wish to hear new things in a new way, you must listen in a new way. Prepare for tomorrow and safeguard yourselves from deceit. Speaking generally, you will never understand what I wish to convey if you merely listen.
In Search of the Miraculous
Chapter 1 (excerpts)
“… Have you ever thought about the fact that all peoples themselves are machines?”
… “I want you to understand what I am saying. Look, all those people you see,” …”are simply machines—nothing more.”
… “You think there is something that chooses its own path, something that can stand against mechanization; you think that not everything is equally mechanical.”
…This must be understood. All the people you see, …know, …may get to know, are machines, actual machines working solely under the power of external influences, as you yourself said. Machines they are born and machines they die. …They are all alike . .
“But there is a possibility of ceasing to be a machine. It is of this we must think, and not about the different kinds of machines that exist.
Opening, William Segal
The Structure of Man
Each man/woman stands midway between the alpha and the omega of the universe. Shaped and determined by earth forces to which he cannot help but react, he is, at the same time, beckoned by a call coming from higher forces. Between the pull of the earth and the Silence, he is made to comprehend and respond to the cosmos above and to the ones below.
On Attention, Christopher Fremantle
(In the Forward by Lillian Firestone Boal)
Once, one of (his) pupils described a serious problem. (Mr. Fremantle responded,) “People don’t realize that when they work, conscious forces come to their aid. …conscious forces are trying to help you. You are not alone.”
This Fundamental Quest – Henriette Lannes
Part III Exchanges 1963-64
Mme Lannes: I feel that I need to be helped by something in which I’ve never had confidence: a finer, more active energy. I do not turn toward it.
(This energy) can relate me to something indisputably more alive. Certain moments are given me because I am attentive. I try to turn my trust toward the source of my life; there the help is. When we are asleep, we turn our backs on it and our lives cannot be clarified by this source.
Exchange in London: Impressions
…The movement of energy can be taken as an influence. But it reaches me through impressions. If I encounter an influence without receiving it, I receive no impressions and it has no action on me. I need the impression—it is like the materialization of the influence—to help me transform something in myself.
Reality of Being
#22. Awakening to a new force
The quality of influence that reaches me depends on the quality of my Presence. And the quality of my Presence depends on the relation of my thought, my feeling and my sensation. In order to be attuned to a more subtle force, the attention of each part needs to concentrate, to become charged with a new meaning and power to relate voluntarily.
#62. The first feeling of unity
As I am, I am defenseless against influences acting on the ordinary level because I am not centered in myself. Being passive, my different centers are necessarily at the mercy of whatever ordinary shock makes them vibrate. But when there is a center of gravity for my functions, an axis, I can receive shocks from another level. So long as my attention remains consciously fixed on this center of gravity, I am invulnerable to the pull of the ordinary level.
#94. A cosmic scale
We need to understand the idea of a cosmic scale, that there is a link connecting humanity with a higher influence. Our lives, the purpose of being alive, can only be understood in relation to forces whose scale and grandeur go beyond ourselves. I am here to obey, to obey an authority that I recognize as greater because I am a particle of it. It calls to be recognized, to be served and to shine through me. There is a need to put myself under this higher influence and a need to relate to it in submitting to its service. I do not realize at the outset that my wish to be is a cosmic wish and that my being needs to situate itself and find its place in a world of forces. I consider it my subjective property, something I can make use of for personal profit. My search is organized on the scale of this subjectivity in which everything is measured from a subjective point of view— me and God. Yet at a certain point I must realize that the origin of the need I feel is not in me alone. There is a cosmic need for the new being that I could become.