If you have not by nature a critical mind your staying here is useless. —Aphorism, Views From the Real World
Teachings of Gurdjieff a Pupils Journal, C.S. Nott
Gurdjieff was always giving people shocks in order to make them use their critical faculty. To one young pupil he said, ‘Never believe anything you hear me say. Learn to discriminate between what must be taken literally and what metaphorically.’
Some of us were having supper with him in his apartment on the Boulevard Pereire. A young man, an American, asked him why he always shut the windows at mealtimes. Gurdjieff went into a long explanation of how necessary it was to keep vibrations from being lost through open windows, and so on and so forth, while the young man listened wide-eyed. He left before the rest of us. When he had gone, Gurdjieff said, ‘You see, he takes everything literally, without pondering. He will go back to Prieuré and shut all the windows all the time, and I shan’t be able to get a breath of fresh air.’ The windows were closed, of course, to keep out the noise of the street. —New York And Fontainebleau 1923-5
This Fundamental Quest, Henriette Lannes
Mme Lannes: All genuine work begins with doubt. I doubt myself. I have the courage to doubt myself. What are you afraid of losing? Obviously, there is something we love very much, and that we are going to lose—our lies. But apart from that, are you going to lose anything real? Lying is stronger than we think; a large part of our lives is based on it. If we do not lose our lies, the real cannot develop in us. We try to open to a feeling of reality, and this reality is perhaps going to work in us. —Further Exchanges: With a Young Group (1963-64)
The Reality of Being
It is absurd to pretend in my sleep that I wish to work, while all the time dreaming that I can. I need to put in doubt my illusion of myself, my habitual affirmation. —37. A way of understanding
We do not value enough the short moments when we are situated between two forces. At each step in remembering ourselves, we encounter doubt. I doubt myself, I doubt a more real part of me, I doubt that I can find help— possibilities higher than what I know… I have to struggle with doubt until something gives up. Then help appears which calls me to remain true to maintaining the relation with a higher energy. —45. To “know myself”
…Between faith and doubt there is a continual movement back and forth, but I am unable to hold this under my look or understand it…
It is necessary to experience and recognize in myself a reality…I cannot doubt. It must appear more real than everything I think I know of myself as essential. It is at this moment that faith is touched in me. This is not a faith that has been instilled, not a belief in an ideal. —123. Faith
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Conscious faith is freedom. Emotional faith is slavery. Mechanical faith is foolishness. —Aphorism, Views From the Real World
Meetings With G.I. Gurdjieff in Paris 1944
Mr. Gurdjieff: Only one who has no faith can have the possibility of going forward. From the start, he must be critical and take everything as in mathematics: two times two, four. If you’ve understood the truth of a thing like that, you can keep it in yourself. If you only believe, without verifying it… kill that belief, for you believe anything… (I)f you cannot be sure. Just take it as material to be checked afterwards, but don’t take anything without criticizing it. If you have verified that two times two is four, then you can afford to let it crystallize in you. But the one who automatically believes goes to psychopathy. He will never be a man. He is a half-man, a “misunderstanding”. The real man believes nothing but what he can prove either mathematically or by finding it by frequent experiments. This is my opinion. If my own brother asked me that question, I wouldn’t answer him anything else. Believe neither father, nor God, nor nothing, except yourself. Apart from you, have doubts, suspicions about everything. Don’t believe anything except what you can practically prove. The rest can remain as theoretical material. Any intelligent man knows that the more material he has, the more possibilities he has to choose then, to orient himself, to make statistics based on his experiences. But you must check this material. Among other things, since we are talking about statistics, three quarters of people who are engaged in self-perfection and who live in monasteries are lost by faith. In the remaining quarter, there are many who are lost through their education and many other things. The result is that 1% stays on the right track. The greatest scourge that one can meet on the path to the possibility of liberation is faith. But there are two kinds of faith: ordinary faith for “men” in quotation marks, and faith for real men without quotation marks. This faith has a completely different character. It’s real faith. A man theoretically knows, he is theoretically convinced of the existence of God, and even by autosuggestion or any other such means he believes, but that is quite a different quality. I divide faith into two qualities, like everything else, depending on whether it belongs to the “man” in quotation marks or to the man without quotation marks. I told you God. I said it as an example. I’m not talking about your God to you, with his old Jewish beard! —Friday February 4, 1944
Meetings With Remarkable Men
Abram Yelov: ‘It is not a question of to whom a man prays, but a question of his faith. Faith is conscience, the foundation of which is laid in childhood… (C)onscience is the most valuable thing in a man… and since his conscience is sustained by his faith and his faith by his religion, therefore I respect his religion; and for me it would be a great sin if I should begin to judge his religion or to disillusion him about it, and thus destroy his conscience which can only be acquired in childhood.’