Jeanne Vaysse
Many indications…lead us to feel that there are two natures in us. One of them is personal or individual, (and) is relatively accessible to our usual means of perception. The other, much less easy to perceive, is experienced as our participation in something far greater than the individual… (W)e hardly know how to speak about it. The attention paid to it varies a great deal from person to person, and at different moments of life. (A)lmost everybody, however, will recognize that…he has felt, alongside an egocentric, selfish tendency, this need for something infinite or “absolute.”
From the moment a man turns toward himself like this, questions himself, and struggles to understand both what he is and what he could be, it becomes clear that he can turn in either of two ways… One is entirely oriented toward the outside, and is centered chiefly on…“the individual”… (His) effectiveness in outer life is the main value by which he is classified. The other way to turn…concerns the inner life: it is centered…on the “realization” of the latent possibilities contained within the individual. It develops the faculties and qualities characteristic of his human nature, and hence the accession to….levels of life or worlds of which outer life has no suspicion.
These two kinds of life can seem contradictory at first… It is obvious however, that each corresponds to one of our natures, and that a complete man must live both at the same time; they are his human nature, which thus includes within itself a permanent contradiction. —Towards Awakening, Inner and Outer Life
Mme. de Salzmann
It is difficult to accept the idea of having both an objective life and, at the same time, a personal life—that is, to be subjective, to let oneself live a personal life… Of course, we cannot be otherwise than personal—subjective, with our own body, our likes and dislikes, our personal feelings. This subjective life will always remain. Yet I must know it, I must experience it. My subjective life is what I am, it is me. At the same time, there is something in me that enables me to be objective in relation to it. If I am also to open to what is higher, my subjective life must be put in its place…. I cannot have a free attention if I do not sacrifice what keeps it enslaved. Everything I wish has to be paid for. If I wish to have a new state, I must sacrifice the old. We never get more than we give up. What we receive is proportional to what we sacrifice. —The Reality of Being, 136. A look from Above
Maurice Desselle
Maurice Desselle: My work can appear to me as a sort of refuge, as certain privileged moments when I have an undeniable contact with something higher in myself, but having no action, no resonance upon my life. Or again, I might try to change my life, to make it conform more to a work, whose aim I am not sure I understand. This temptation, carried to an extreme, leads to retirement from the world. It is a temptation we are familiar with. Or else I try to force my work into my life, attempting to practice ideas which I have barely experienced, and which I have neither understood nor digested…
At the same time, my work must be connected with my life. What then is the link?
Little by little I realize that I am the link; that the apparent contradiction isn’t between my life and what I call my work. It is in myself. At certain moments I can make this necessary distinction between two ways of being, two states…two levels of being… I begin to understand…how by being present to myself…my life could be…the necessary ground for my experience. It is only in life, without changing it at all, accepting it as it, and myself as I am, that I will find the ground that is indispensable for the understanding to which I aspire.
Now the link begins to function. Now a certain reconciliation can begin to take place in me. However, here’s where I must rid myself of an illusion. This reconciliation, this link, is momentary. Not only momentary, but in movement….My work will not be in my life except at the moment…when I try to understand that I belong to two masters between whom I am never able to choose… —Gurdjieff International Review, The Work in Life, Maurice Desselle & Henri Tracol Meeting notes, Paris, June 6, 1964
Henriette Lannes
We must return to the impression of our refusal, our rejection of life, and question ourselves….This current that we slide into has no beginning and no end. This slide toward manifestation or sleep represents a certain current of energy. But there is also a current of awakening, and it is the relationship between these two that is now the very basis of our search. Our feeling of concern arises from this precise place, from the middle of a fundamental contradiction. The heart of our work is at this place. —This Fundamental Quest, Part III, Exchanges
Mme. de Salzmann
Our attention has no center of gravity. It is not magnetized by a force that has some authority, some power over it, and continues to run wherever it is called… I am unable to be more collected in myself, more inside, and at the same time to be more outside… If I can see this inner reality as acting like a magnet, I will see the outside as an opposing attraction, another magnet. Then maybe I will understand what attention means. It is an energy that connects me both with the source and with the outside world, and permits me to receive knowledge, that is, to know. —Reality of Being, 45. To Know Thyself