Gurdjieff
“‘A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.’..
” ‘To awake,’ ‘to die,’ ‘to be born’…are three successive stages. If you study the Gospels attentively you will see…references are often made to the possibility of being born… to the necessity of ‘dying,’ and there are very many references to the necessity of ‘awakening’ — ‘watch, for ye know not the day and hour…’ and. so on. But these three possibilities…are not set down in connection with one another…
“(B)eing ‘born’…relates to the beginning of a new growth of essence, the beginning of the formation of individuality, the beginning of the appearance of one indivisible I.
“But in order to…at least begin to attain it, a man must die, that is, he must free himself from a thousand petty attachments and identifications… He is attached to everything in his life, attached to his imagination… his stupidity… even to his sufferings—possibly to his sufferings more than to anything else. He must free himself from this attachment. Attachment to things, identification with things, keep alive a thousand useless I’s in a man. These I’s must die in order that the big I may be born. But…they…do not want to die. It is at this point that the possibility of awakening comes to the rescue. To awaken means to realize one’s nothingness… one’s complete and absolute mechanicalness and… helplessness. And it is not sufficient to realize it philosophically, in words. It is necessary to realize it in clear, simple, and concrete facts, in one’s own facts. When a man begins to know himself a little he will see in himself many things that are bound to horrify him…A man has seen…something that horrifies him. He decides to throw it off, stop it, put an end to it… But however many efforts he makes…he cannot do this…everything remains as it was. Here he will see his impotence… helplessness, and his nothingness… (A) man sees that he has nothing that is his own, that…his views, thoughts, convictions, tastes, habits, even faults and vices, all these are not his own, but have been either formed through imitation or borrowed from somewhere… In feeling this a man may feel his nothingness… not for a…moment, but constantly, never forgetting it.
“This continual consciousness of his nothingness and of his helplessness will eventually give a man the courage to ‘die’…and to renounce actually and forever…his ‘false I,’ and…all the fantastic ideas about his ‘individuality,’ ‘will,’ ‘consciousness,’ ‘capacity to do,’ his powers, initiative, determination, and so on.
“But in order to see a thing always, one must first of all see it even if only for a second… The same thing applies to awakening. It is impossible to awaken completely all at once. One must first begin to awaken for short moments. But one must die all at once and forever, after having made a certain effort, having surmounted a certain obstacle, having taken a certain decision from which there is no going back. This would be difficult, even impossible, for a man, were it not for the slow and gradual awakening which precedes it. —In Search of the Miraculous, Chapter 11
Michel Conge
In everything we’ve been speaking about this evening, there is amazing hope…
I am man number seven, but I am not aware of it. All the elements of the universe, this text tells us, are in us. It is said that it is very easy to perceive in ourselves the substance of the level of the Sun, the substance of the level of the stars. If I come to understand what that means by direct experience, I carry the trace of all levels in me.
I can wake up to this possibility of fulfilling… of completing myself… But I do not contain the completed being; the completed being contains me.
You understand what real suffering…should be: to suffer from the realization that I could…and should be what I am not. It means beginning to sense and understand …that there is no other cause than this for the unhappiness of my existence… Everything that happens to me happens because I am not what I am. So we realize that this has a meaning for us that is very practical, very direct, and very moving.
Suddenly, this truly speaks to me about myself—a situation absolutely full of hope—and it shows me my own failing: not being open to a reality to which I am invited. I was born for this…
If I remain just a potentiality, a seed, without understanding the call that is contained in the level of my origin, I will be absolutely unable to awaken to my full potential, to my totality, to what is offered to man. You have to go down to the bottom, to the lowest level, for the notion of climbing back up to make sense. There is no harshness, no injustice. It’s absolutely extraordinary. I would not be able to accomplish the work that awaits me if there were not this compulsory descent.
You would remain at a level rich in possibilities, but … ‘I must die in order to be born’. I have to immerse myself in the most painful conditions—those of my life—in order to…give birth to the greatest possibility imaginable. —Inner Octaves, Talks and Exchanges, What is Man?