G.I. Gurdjieff:
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… —Views from the Real World – Essence and Personality
“(T)he conditions of life…in which, so to speak, the work finds (a man), are the best possible 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…simultaneously every side of man’s being… —In Search of the Miraculous —Chapter 2
Here, you accept everything, but in life you do nothing. It is in life that one must do. Until now, no one here has ever done anything in life. Here on Thursdays, with your friends, you talk, you philosophize, but it is worth nothing. What I am saying is only to shed light on things in life. It is in life that one must do. —Paris Meetings 1943, Thursday, September 9
The Work in Life
Maurice Desselle & Henri Tracol, meeting notes, Paris, June 6, 1964
Maurice Desselle: My work can appear to me as a sort of refuge, as certain privileged moments when I have an undeniable contact with something higher in myself, but having no action, no resonance upon my life. Or again, I might try to change my life, to make it conform more to a work, whose aim I am not sure I understand. This temptation, carried to an extreme, leads to retirement from the world. It is a temptation we are familiar with. Or else I try to force my work into my life, attempting to practice ideas which I have barely experienced, and which I have neither understood nor digested…
At the same time, my work must be connected with my life. What then is the link?
Little by little I realize that I am the link; that the apparent contradiction isn’t between my life and what I call my work. It is in myself. At certain moments I can make this necessary distinction between two ways of being, two states…or rather…two levels of being… I begin to understand…how by being present to myself…my life could be, in the light of my work…the necessary ground for my experience. It is only in life, without changing it at all, accepting it as it, and myself as I am, that I will find the ground that is indispensable for the understanding to which I aspire.
Now the link begins to function. Now a certain reconciliation can begin to take place in me. However, here’s where I must rid myself of an illusion. This reconciliation, this link, is momentary. Not only momentary, but in movement. Truly. My work will not be in my life except at the moment or moments when I try to understand that I belong to two masters between whom I am never able to choose…
Henri Tracol: On the hanging suspended above the students’ heads in the Study House (at the Institute), Mr. Gurdjieff had written this aphorism… “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… 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…
When we attempt to cover life with an abstract diagram of what it ought to be, and try to impose on it a form from the outside which constrains it, we distort the real direction of our efforts, which is rather to understand this life better by participating in it more. For it is by knowing it better, always from more angles and aspects, by understanding the forces that animate us, that the transformation of being to which we aspire will begin to take place.
Work according to the Fourth Way cannot be outside of life. It is at the very heart of life, and it calls us to as full an expression as possible, in the midst of life… —translated from French by Dorothea Dooling and Patty de Llosa.
G.I. Gurdjieff:
We have a property: if you are on the right path, nature immediately…crystallizes the exact factor in you that is going to stand in your way. The further you are on the right path, the more nature will send you obstacles of this kind to prevent you from continuing. This is how it is in life…
The main thing is to decide how you want to behave, what you want to do, the relationship you want to establish with each person; that is what a programme is. And you believe only in this. And even if God comes to disturb you, and tells you to do something else, you must not do it. Maybe He has come just to trip you up. You do only what you decided to do… —Paris Meetings 1943, Thursday, December 9
Gurdjieff: Life is a theatre where every man plays a role… 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. —Transcripts of Gurdjieff’s Meetings 1941-46, Meeting Six, Thursday, 1 July 1943