Madame de Salzmann
In our lives we never fully accomplish what we intend to do. All our movements and actions are subject to the Law of Seven. They begin in one direction but cannot pass the interval in the octave. We go up to the note mi and return to do. To go further, there must be an additional force from within and from without. —The Reality of Being, 84. The intensity must increase
G. I. Gurdjieff
“…straight lines never occur in our activities… (H)aving begun to do one thing, we in fact constantly do something entirely different, often the opposite of the first, although we do not notice this, and continue to think that we are doing the same thing that we began to do…
“Such…a change of direction, we can observe in everything. After a certain period of energetic activity or strong emotion or a right understanding, a reaction comes, work becomes tedious and tiring; moments of fatigue and indifference enter into feeling; instead of right thinking a search for compromises begins; suppression, evasion of difficult problems. But the line continues to develop, though now not in the same direction as at the beginning. Work becomes mechanical, feeling becomes weaker and weaker, descends to the level of the common events of the day; thought becomes dogmatic, literal. Everything proceeds in this way for a certain time, then again there is reaction, again a stop, again a deviation. The development of the force may continue, but the work which was begun with great zeal and enthusiasm has become an obligatory and useless formality; a number of entirely foreign elements have entered into feeling—considering, vexation, irritation, hostility; thought goes round in a circle, repeating what was known before, and the way out which had been found becomes more and more lost.
“The same thing happens in all spheres of human activity… (A)bove all in social and political life, we can observe how the line of the development of forces deviates from its original direction and goes, after a certain time, in a diametrically opposite direction, still preserving its former name…
“(I)t is only in octaves of a cosmic order, both descending and ascending, that vibrations develop in a consecutive and orderly way, following the same direction in which they started…
“(R)ight and consistent development of octaves, although rare, can be observed in all the occasions of life, and in the activity of nature, and even in human activity.
“The…development of these octaves is based on what looks an accident. It sometimes happens that octaves… parallel to (a) given octave, intersecting or meeting it in some way or another, fill up its ‘intervals,’ and make it possible for…the given octave to develop…along the original direction, neither losing anything nor changing its nature…
“But those lines…which are straightened out by accident, and which man can sometimes see, or suppose, or expect, create in him more than anything else the illusion of straight lines. That is to say, he thinks that straight lines are the rule, and broken and interrupted lines the exception. This in its turn creates in him the illusion that it is possible to do; possible to attain a projected aim. In reality a man can do nothing…
“There remains for a man…finding a direction…which corresponds to the mechanical line of events(—)of ‘going where the wind blows’ or… reconciling himself to the failure of everything he starts out to do; or he can learn to recognize…’intervals’ in all lines of his activity, and learn to apply…the method which cosmic forces make use of in creating ‘additional shocks’ at the moments necessary. —In Search of the Miraculous, Chapter 7
P. D. Ouspensky
(We can) take school-work as an ascending octave… If I work on three lines, or three octaves, one line will help another to pass the interval by giving the necessary shock… three lines of work is a special arrangement to safeguard the right direction of the work, and to make it successful…
(W)hen one line reaches an interval, another line comes in to help it over, since the places of these intervals do not coincide… —The Fourth Way, Chapter 10
With certain kinds of effort we can produce these missing semi-tones, fill the intervals and in this way change the work of our machine. For instance…how the effort to remember oneself changes many things in the chemistry of our organism. —The Fourth Way, Chapter 8
Jerry Brewster
…The real knowledge of intervals… the taste of intervals, is very important. We need to have many experiences of being in front of intervals. Often…I don’t know I’m at an interval…. I feel guilty; I feel I can’t work. When I start to feel self-pity or guilt and the frustration… I often fall away from the interval, and become emotional…
The trouble is, we don’t stay at the interval, taste the interval or even see it as an interval. We see it as a personal failure…
We repeat and repeat many times unnecessarily, but if we just keep repeating mechanically, we’ll need a thousand years to evolve. —Spiritual Physics – Work Ideas
Maurice Nicoll
(P)assage between Mi-Fa… is…a…crisis-point…
When we realize that this crisis…is in the nature of the Universe, and is not some person’s fault, we begin to grow up. We even…take the reins in our hands, realizing that it is oneself that has to learn how to live…. (W)e learn not only where we want energy, and what efforts we have to make, but also what is inevitable in the very nature of things—namely, the existence of… resistance in regard to everything we want, and also this narrow place of crisis called Mi-Fa where, unless a shock is given, everything dies away and nothing is achieved. —Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol 3 – Great Amwell House, October 2, 1948 – Crisis