The Reality of Being
This ordinary “I,” our ego… desires, fights, defends itself, compares and judges all the time… This “I” always wants to possess more… Why does the “I” have this exaggerated need to be something, to make sure of it, and to express this at every moment? It has a fear of being nothing. Is not identification, at its core, based on fear? —119. The affirmation of my self
In Search of the Miraculous
There are periods in the life of humanity, which generally coincide with the beginning of the fall of cultures and civilizations, when the masses irretrievably lose their reason and begin to destroy everything that has been created by centuries and millenniums of culture. Such periods of mass madness, often coinciding with geological cataclysms, climatic changes, and similar phenomena of a planetary character, release a very great quantity of the matter of knowledge…
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… —Chapter 2
Teachings of Gurdjieff: A Pupils Journal, C.S. Nott
(C.S. Nott:) New York is a city of fear and, like all big cities, a centre of tension. A big city is a kind of dynamo which sucks the energy from millions of human beings, whom nature causes to herd together in certain parts of the planet in enormous numbers, like ants and termites in their colossal hills—all doubtless for a cosmic purpose. The termites, who have sacrificed their sight, their sex, and their liberty to the State, no doubt point with pride to the size of their towns, as some New Yorkers and Londoners boast of their cities… —New York and Fontainebleau 1923-5
Gurdjieff’s Emissary in New York: Talks and Lectures with A.R. Orage 1924-1931
(Orage:) …Negative emotions such as hate, fear, anger, etc. may be transmuted into higher emotions, of which they are often the embryo. This is done by change of attitude… If by transmuting this into higher emotions through self-observation we can diminish the supply, we are really…stealing from the devil…
The great criticism of the League of Nations, from this point of view, was that it was simply a redistribution of hate, and one individual who could consciously transmute a small part of hate into higher emotion has accomplished more for the benefit of mankind than any settlement of war conditions could possibly do… —5 January
…The ordinary fear of death is a lower emotion because it is concerned with what will happen to the body. But the fear of what will happen to “I” after death is a higher emotion. All higher emotions are related to “I.” —Monday, 26 April 1926
G.I. Gurdjieff Paris Meetings 1943
…I can always be afraid, but this fear must not take over completely. It must remain localized somewhere in the function where it appeared. It must not have any influence over the rest. My body was afraid, but not me; whereas you, you yourself become fear – your whole presence is nothing but fear.
This happens because your head is not independent, not detached, not free from the rest. Your head is your ‘self’. It is your Reason. That is where your intelligence is. This is your individuality. Everyone has a body, everyone has feeling, but rare are those who have a head that lives an independent life—free, never influenced. Only the head can be just; only the head can be impartial. The head must have the initiative, whereas with you at present, it’s all the rest that has the initiative. And the rest is shit, a piece of meat.
For you, at present, the head must be… a watch man, always turned inward to see with inner sight and to know these two parts: body and feeling. It must watch with a strong attention, but without tensing, and know where the impulses come from… Only then will it be able to play its role, which is to direct, to initiate. —Thursday, June 8
Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson
Think what would be the state of a man who could clearly picture to himself and experience the inevitability of his own death!
How is it possible to reconcile the fact that a man is terrified by a timid little mouse…and by thousands of similar trifles which might never even occur, and yet experiences no terror in the face of the inevitability of his own death?…
When this contradiction is considered soberly… it becomes perfectly obvious that all these fears…are expressly permitted by Nature to the extent to which they are indispensable for the process of our ordinary existence.
And indeed…without all these, in the objective sense, “flea bites,” which appear to us as “unprecedented terrors”—we could not have any experiencings at all, whether of joy, sorrow, hope, disappointment, and so on, nor could we have all those cares, stimuli, strivings, or in general any of the impulses that constrain us to act, to attain something, and to strive toward some aim…
There is in our life a certain very great purpose, and we must all serve this great common purpose…
All people without exception are slaves of this “Greatness,” and all are compelled willy-nilly to submit, and to fulfill without condition or compromise what has been predestined for each of us by his transmitted heredity and his acquired being…
Although the real man, who has already acquired his own “I,” and the man in quotation marks, who has not, are equally slaves of that same “Greatness,” the difference between them…consists in this, that since the attitude of the first toward his slavery is conscious, he acquires the possibility…of applying a part of his manifestations…to the attainment of “imperishable Being”, whereas the second, not cognizing his slavery, serves…merely as a thing, which, when no longer needed, disappears forever. —From the Author
Inner Octaves, Michel Conge
…I am paralyzed with fear. I am not yet fully convinced that, no matter what, I am eaten alive. When this becomes indisputable, I will dare to turn in the other direction; and when I understand that this sacrifice is possible only if I consent to it… I will begin to serve.
To serve means more than wanting to lend a hand… It means serving as food, serving as a passageway, serving this return…for the sake of evolution… —What Evolves?