The Reality of Being
44. The way down
…When I awaken in life by chance, I see that I am not prepared. My engagement is not by conscious choice and my attention is scattered… My effort has to be made with something beyond my ordinary means, beyond my ordinary “I.”
For this I have to take a decision. I decide to remember myself and to remain related in two directions at a predetermined moment in a specific circumstance. Usually, my moments of work are isolated and unconnected. When I remember myself alone in the quiet, I go away from what I am in life. I refuse what I am in life and cannot know it. Then, when I try in life, I have nothing prepared in advance, nothing on which my effort can be based. My effort is therefore weak, slack. So I need to connect the moments when I work in the quiet with the moments of work in life. I need to connect them consciously by a decision. …
…I need to anticipate the resistance. There are obstacles that I must understand, … My passivity does not wish to give up and is a very cunning beast. It will tell me that it cannot decide or carry out a decision. This is true—it cannot. But something else can…
When I have achieved something, there is always the tendency to become satisfied and to stop working. I forget the strength of my inertia when there is a complete standstill, and how difficult it is to start again. I must learn how always to make new impulses for work, conditions that are hard enough, yet not too hard. If they are not hard enough, they will not serve as an impulse. If too hard, they will create such resistance that I cannot go on. Do not make a promise to yourself that you cannot be sure you are able to keep. If you undertake a task, you must feel it as a strong necessity from the beginning of the day. In order to bring a struggle, the demand must have the force of a strong identification.
Transcripts of Gurdjieff’s Meetings 1941-1946
Meeting Seventeen
Gurdjieff: …We have a property. If you are on a good path, nature puts immediately in you an idea; she crystalizes in you the exact factor that is going to calm you in order to prevent you from continuing on the good way. The more you are on the right way, the more nature uses of these things. It is thus in life.
You shall do this therefore: you shall become calm in a good state; you shall sit, very tranquilly… And you no longer believe anything or anyone. You make a program. When you have no program, anything, no matter what idiocy, what worthlessness, what rot, can rule you. Have confidence only in the program that you shall have made in a special state. The principle thing is to make this program: how you want to behave, what you want to do, the relations that you want to have with everyone; this is a program. And you believe only in this. And even if God comes to disturb you and to tell you to do something else, you believe Him not. Perhaps he has come rightly in order to play you a dirty trick. You do only that which you have decided in your special state.
…The program laid out, you enter into life and you do only that which corresponds to your program. …You send the whole world to the devil; you believe only in your program and in your own decision. (T)here are many dogs which nature puts in us expressly to make us weak. Nature is perhaps interested in there being few men on the right path.
Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson
Chapter 13 – Why in man’s reason fantasy may be perceived as reality
“…the three-brained beings who have taken your fancy, particularly the contemporary ones, fail to fulfill ‘being-partkdolgduty,’ and now there are never crystallized in them any subjective being-convictions formed by their own logical deliberations—as in general is proper to three-brained beings— but instead, only those convictions are crystallized that depend exclusively upon the opinions of others.
“…’being-partkdolgduty’… alone enables a being to become aware of genuine reality…
“This strange trait of their psyche, that of being satisfied with whatever Smith or Brown says without trying to know more, became rooted in them long ago, and now they no longer make the least effort to know anything that can be understood solely by their own active reflection.
“…they themselves are to blame for it, on account of the abnormal conditions of external ordinary being-existence they gradually established, and which have progressively fostered in their common presence what has now become their ‘inner evil god,’ called ‘self-calming.’
Views From the Real World
Introduction, quoting Jeanne de Salzmann…
“…while the truth sought for was always the same, the forms through which (Gurdjieff) helped his pupils approach it served only for a limited time. As soon as a new understanding had been reached, the form would change.
“Readings, talks, discussions and studies, which had been the main feature of work for a period of time and had stimulated the intelligence to the point of opening it to an entirely new way of seeing, were for some reason or other suddenly brought to an end.
…”Unexpected conditions were brought about in order to upset habits. The only possibility of facing the new situation was through a deep self-examination, with that total sincerity which alone can change the quality of human feeling.
“Then the body, in its turn, was required to collect all the energy of its attention, to attune itself to an order which it was there to serve.
…”The ideas are a summons, a summons towards another world, a call from one who knows and who is able to show us the way. But the transformation of the human being requires something more. It can only be achieved if there is a real meeting between the conscious force which descends and the total commitment that answers it. This brings about a fusion.
“A new life can then appear in a new set of conditions which only someone with an objective consciousness can create and develop.
“But to understand this one must have passed through all the stages of this development. Without such experience and understanding the work will lose its effectiveness and the conditions will be wrongly interpreted; they will not be brought at the right moment and situations and efforts will remain on the level of ordinary life, uselessly repeating themselves.”