Lord Pentland: Readers of In Search of the Miraculous, and also of other introductions to Gurdjieff’s teaching, soon discover that Gurdjieff recommended self-study and self-observation as the starting point for serious inner work. Those who go on to practice real self-observation, eventually find out that it is much more than a starting point. I am constantly forgetting what I decided to do, getting lost in what I am doing and wasting time doing nothing, while the very awareness of my being free and alive is drowned in associations and fears and dreams. Then, just the thought of self observation or some other true idea, like man can not do, is a reminder that often acts like a sailor’s compass in showing me how to come back in front of myself, as we sometimes say, back to square one. So this idea of self-observation and the attitude connected with it become a sort of magical thread for finding the work again when one has strayed from the path.
Looking back to my own beginnings; the first idea that penetrated deeply was not self-observation at all, but the question put to us repeatedly by Madame Ouspensky, “What do you want?” Madame, she was always called simply Madame, was constantly arranging conditions, whether through physical labor, on the farm, through her carefully formulated questions and messages to us, or through talks as we sat on the floor in her bedroom, which had the effect of miraculously renewing our energies and zest for living at the expense of the ugly and sleepy associations inside us. When we felt that renewal, she did not merely tell us to observe and record how it appeared, but confronted us with this question: “What do you want?” I did not understand.I need to practice and observe again and again how the quieting of my thoughts and functions permits a penetration into the mysterious movement of feeling toward what I really want, towards my wish. Our fundamental datum is this possibility of being. The wish to be is a tiny part of me which is easily lost and forgotten, but has such value that when it appears, and it does appear, it is felt as sacred. Why my lower functions are quiet enough the wish may be experienced as a movement that passes through the space occupied by my body and frees me to let go of the forms of particular thoughts and even of emotions, and so to touch the vibrations of what Gertrdude Stein called “my bottom nature”, my essence. The wish has to be real, there is no room for doubt about it. The feeling of I has to be really felt, even if it is very fragile. Getting stuck in a thought about trying harder or becoming quieter will not help, nor will it help to be solemn and try to induce the feeling of sacredness. To know sincerely that the feeling is missing will sometimes enable me to open to it. However, this movement toward the wish soon gets blocked. Sooner or later it meets resistance. The wish to work and the resistance to it, which Jane Heap in some notes made before her meetings, aptly named the wish not to work, must be seen separately and studied again and again in order to understand the question of “What do you want?” For this purpose, exercises are usually given as a help.
