This Fundamental Quest, Henriette Lannes – Responsibility
As long as we remain submerged in ignorance we are irresponsible, whether we are thieves or altruists. In our mechanical state, we respond only partially to the varied demands of life…
To be fully responsible is only a distant aim. Nonetheless, we can approach it if we understand what it asks of us in quite definite situations.
When the question of responsibility is raised, a confusion often slips in. People who possess a feeling of responsibility also believe that they possess consciousness, although the feeling of responsibility is actually what helps them move toward consciousness.
Our search calls on us to feel responsible for our actions, our manifestations; this is an indispensable condition for all work on ourselves toward further development. This call to responsibility stirs a feeling of gratitude, which is not evident at first but gradually becomes so as a new understanding of our state of being awakens in us. …It falls to us to feel responsible for this process.
This question of responsibility also puts us in touch with the notion of good and evil. …But how to open ourselves more to understanding them? It was said to us by Mr. Gurdjieff that a true understanding of responsibility always begins with the knowledge of good and evil. But today, what do we know of objective evil and objective good?
In Search of the Miraculous – Chapter 1
A machine, a real machine, does not know itself and cannot know itself. When a machine knows itself it is then no longer a machine, at least, not such a machine as it was before. It already begins to be responsible for its actions.”
…”A man” (he emphasized this word) “is responsible. A machine is not responsible.”
Conversations with Madame Ouspensky 1939-40 at Lyne
From Notes of Robert S. de Ropp, Far West Press, 1974
…We ourselves are process and part of another process. On us and on our realization depends whether we add a drop here or a drop there. We are responsible to the world. We become instruments in the hands of one force or the other. …
Study yourself as a machine in which different processes are taking place.
The person who works blames himself. He realizes that he is responsible. Every action has consequences we cannot tell how serious. We are part of a big process and have it in our power to add a drop on this side or that.
(November 2, 1940 ) …We must realize that two processes go on in us and in the world, construction and destruction. Only inner construction counts for anything.
Life is Real Only Then, When I Am, (Third Series)
Introduction by Mme. de Salzmann
Before he died, Gurdjieff (gave) me certain instructions:
“Publish as and when you are sure that the time has come. …But the essential thing, the first thing, is to prepare a nucleus of people capable of responding to the demand which will arise.
“So long as there is no responsible nucleus, the action of the ideas will not go beyond a certain threshold. That will take time … a lot of time, even.
The Reality of Being
#49. We say we are “in the Work”
We say that we are “in the Work.” What does it mean? The Work is a special current sustained by a source of energy that can only be touched by a person who is whole. This current consists of a certain energy of thought, of feeling, of action. Its life depends on the individuals entering it, who are each and all together responsible for what gives it quality, lucidity…
Until today we have received the fruits of the efforts, and energy of those who came before. Now the life of the Work depends on us. The Work will not live without us, without our sharing in the responsibility. This requires a total engagement, with all our intelligence, all our willingness.
The Work could play its role in the world if we understood the way, the form, that is needed to correspond to the state of things today.
#53. A special condition for exchange
What then is our responsibility? We have an obligation to exchange, and to accept and help each one to play his role in the group so that consciousness, the measure of our actual awareness, determines everything we do. In becoming conscious of ourselves as a group, we experience the truth of our work. It is not right if I only do what I wish in my own way, independent, unwilling to be tested. This shows I am incapable of confronting myself and of relating to the work of another. It means my work has stopped. If the group does not become conscious of itself as a group, it cannot know its place and obligations in the Work. It cannot serve, cannot play its role in the Work.
The group, the fact that we are together, creates a possibility of consciousness. What we engage, what we give, is more important than what we wish to take. Each time the possibility is renewed, we have the opportunity to engage our attention and to serve. This possibility is something great that we must strive to maintain. We have to look at it as precious, as sacred.
#94. A cosmic scale
…A certain current, a certain magnetism, needs to be created in which each person finds his place, that is, the place which will permit the current to be better established. Our whole responsibility is here.
Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson
From the Author
As long as we remain passive, not only shall we have inevitably to serve solely as a means for Nature’s “involutionary creation” but for the rest of our lives we shall have to submit slavishly to the caprice of all sorts of blind events.
As most of the listeners present today have already, as is said, “crossed over” into responsible age and sincerely recognize that until now they have not acquired their own “I” …, then, in order that you …should not be too greatly “disheartened” and fall into the usual “pessimism”…of contemporary people, I say quite frankly, …even for you, it is not yet too late.
…in her infinite care, Mother Nature has foreseen the possibility for beings to acquire the kernel of their essence, that is to say, their own “I,” even after they have reached responsible age.