Mr. Gurdjieff
“Every man is born number one, number two, or number three.
“Man number four…can neither be born, nor develop accidentally… Man number four already stands on a different level… he has a permanent center of gravity… In addition his psychic centers have already begun to be balanced; one center in him cannot have such a preponderance over others, as is the case with people of the first three categories. He already begins to know himself, and begins to know whither he is going. —In Search of the Miraculous, Chapter 4
Jerry Brewster
The Work is for change of being, it’s not to feel better or get relief… (T)hat’s change of state, and it’s very important to differentiate between change of state and change of being, or transformation of state and transformation of being. Change of state is of the moment, a day or a week. Change of being is a year, a decade, a lifetime. This Work is a work for change of being.
There are many spiritual ways…better than the Work for a change of state… But the minute you walk out the door you (return to) your postures, your tensions, your anxieties, your values; you go back to the center of gravity of your level of being…
A group…trying to be present generates energy; there are Movements which give you a lot of energy, there are readings and discussion groups. It actually works very well; you get your ‘work injection.’ (B)ut there is one big problem—personality can hide in that glow of vibration; your features can hide; your buffers can hide… This energy was ‘given’ to you to help you struggle… —Spiritual Physics: Another Generation’s View of the Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, Compiled and edited by John Anderson and Marshall May, Chapter 2.08
Henri Tracol
(I)n 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. I think it’s a danger that lies in wait for us all. 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. Whatever form our dissatisfactions and hopes took, we came to the work asking, above all, for help to live this life, help to recover a more real, more convincing, meaning for it. And that’s what we discard when we give way to an image born of experiences that are still fragmentary and hopes that are not yet legitimate.
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. —The Work in Life, Maurice Desselle and Henri Tracol, June 6, 1964 in Paris at a weekly meeting
Maurice Nicoll
In life… we are always trying to be like something, always trying to imitate, always pretending to be something we are not. If a man were to find real ‘I’ in himself, which lies vertically above him in the scale of being, he would no longer be like anything, but would be himself—what he is… —Commentaries, Volume 1, Commentary on Effort, Birdlip, January 17, 1942, Commentary on Effort
Madame de Salzmann
This Work is a school for developing a new center of gravity. Until now the center of gravity around which our life has turned— whether we accept it or not— has been our ordinary “I.” And it is still this “I” that hopes, that evaluates, that judges … and all this even in the name of the Work. So long as my entire psyche turns around this “I,” everything that is manifested— whether I wish it or not— will reflect the authority of this “I.” Our aim in a school of the Fourth Way is to become different, to change our being from the level of man number one, two, three to that of man number four with a new center of gravity, and from the level of man number four to that of man number five with an indivisible “I.” —Reality of Being, 52. A school of the Fourth Way