This Fundamental Quest, Henriette Lannes
The Role of Influences: In the Beginning
The child… is the most fragile and probably the weakest of all creatures to arrive in our world…
In this new being, the instinctive function is complete… The education of the moving function begins very early, by imitation…
Much if not all of what later comes to the child,… will belong to the sphere of personality, that is, it will essentially affect the moving or mechanical parts of the centers… All the repetitive forms already existing as habits in the child will encourage him to confine himself to those very forms, across all of the functions… how to be polite, how to have good manners, how above all to consider and fear the opinions of others…
…The emotions, of course, are educated by imitation and considering…
How could parents call feelings like gratitude, acknowledgment, respect, or authentic love of self, which should come before authentic love of others?…
…We must… become a little clearer about the education of human beings in general and ourselves in particular…
In Search of the Miraculous
Chapter 8
“…A man can take everything in such a personal way as though everything in the world had been specially arranged in order to give him pleasure, or on the contrary, to cause him inconvenience or unpleasantness.
“…Such considering is wholly based upon ‘requirements.’ A man inwardly ‘requires’ that everyone should… constantly give expression to their respect, esteem, and admiration for him, for his intellect… his wit, his presence of mind, his originality, and all his other qualities. Requirements in their turn are based on a completely fantastic notion about themselves…
“There is still another form of considering… that he is not considering another person enough, that this other person is offended with him for not considering him sufficiently… (P)erhaps he does not think enough about this other, does not pay him enough attention, does not give way to him enough. All this is simply weakness. People are afraid of one another…
A Study Of Gurdjieff’s Teaching, Kenneth Walker
Chapter IV – Knowledge and Being
External considering is the precise opposite of inner considering, and it would be the correct antidote to inner considering if we could only manage to produce it when required. But external considering is an extremely difficult accomplishment, as difficult to evoke in ourselves as is self-remembering. It demands an entirely different attitude and relationship to other people, namely, a preoccupation with their welfare instead of with our own. The man who considers externally does his best to understand the other person and to see what are his needs, and he is only able to do this if his own requirements are entirely put on one side. External consideration demands of the man who is practicing it a great deal of knowledge and an equal amount of self-control, and this means that it can never happen automatically in a state of sleep, but necessitates a state approaching self-remembering. No person who externally considers can ever talk to another person ‘for his good’, or ‘to put him right’, or ‘to explain to him his own point of view’, for external consideration makes no demands and has no requirements other than those of the person addressed. It allows of no feeling of superiority on the part of the person who is externally considering, for what he is trying to do is to put himself into the other man’s place in order that he may be able to discover his needs. This necessitates the abandonment of the last shred of self-identification and, in order that the other person may be seen as he really is, the distorting glasses of the personality… have to be laid on one side so that he is viewed as objectively as possible.
The Teachings of Gurdjieff, C.S. Nott
New York And Fontainebleau 1923-5
‘… It is necessary to work on oneself, to learn to be unbiased… only then can one be just. To be just at the moment of action is a hundred times more valuable than to be just afterwards. And only when you can be really impartial as regards yourself will you be able to be impartial towards others.
‘…When Gurdjieff spoke about the uselessness of most of our suffering… one was reminded of the aphorism: ‘One of the chief aids to felicity is to be able to consider exteriorly always; interiorly, never.’
New York And Fontainebleau 1925-6
…(G.) said: ”…Never can you know the subjective state of another; the subjective state of two people is never the same… like finger-prints… And no one can explain his own subjective state to another. A man does not really know why he is angry with you. You can say, “He is not angry with me—his state is angry with me.” Remember this, and never reply with your interior, which is inner considering, and don’t harbor associations of revenge and resentment. Good wishing can be effective over great distances—bad wishing also.’
The Reality of Being, Jeanne de Salzmann
3. I do not know myself
…I must know the feeling of emptiness and see the lie in always affirming an image of myself, the false “I.” …Usually I look to the attitude of others in order to be convinced of my being. If they reject or ignore me, I doubt myself. If they accept me, I believe in myself.
50. Why together?
Each of us is alone and in our self must be alone—alone in front of our understanding, in front of the call of the divine and the fact of our human person. I become linked with others when I begin to recognize my original nature and see that we all have the same difficulty realizing it with the whole of ourselves.
Mount Analogue, Rene Daumal
I am dead because I lack desire;
I lack desire because I think I possess;
I think I possess because I do not try to give.
In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;
Seeing you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;
Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing;
Seeing you are nothing, you desire to become;
In desiring to become, you begin to live.