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Exchanges Within, Lord Pentland
The real force comes from above and I am down here. This “above” is always different from what I expected, when I find it. It is never expected. Think of all the trouble people cause who want to make over the world according to their point of view. We are part of the world. We wish to be conscious that we are a part.
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Is it possible that this higher energy – if it’s experienced at all, is obviously a dangerous energy; in the sense that it’s higher it’s more powerful than I am; in the sense that it has a different quality nothing that I’ve accumulated in quantity can be set against it; it’s greater than I am – is it possible for me to relate directly to that energy, as it were on a one-to-one basis, without intermediary, without fear, in order that its wishes should be accomplished in me as well as up above? This is what we’re talking about as I understand it.
If you mean by something higher, something you don’t know, obviously you don’t know how to approach it. It has no real meaning to think of it as above me. The higher energy we need, that can pass into us, is all around me. What is higher? Look up. What is higher? The level of energy is higher.
So I make myself available as far as I can by being more sensitive and by making a more stable wish to come in touch with this higher energy. You see that’s where the work on emotions fits in. To observe emotions is interesting and very valuable in the sense of observation, for then more energy is taken from the emotion to observe. Do you follow? In observing the emotion there is more energy being used for observing that would otherwise go into the emotion. By accumulation of many observations, I could free myself from emotions.
You don’t feel emotional, true, but sensation enables me to observe, to control, the emotion. And when I’m not emotional, the sensation can connect me with emotion. I need to be free regarding the emotions, and that’s possible by observing myself only. Why do I need to be free in relation to emotions? There are two reasons and they don’t conflict with each other but they often get mixed up. The first is because my ordinary relationships with other human beings are important to me and the first collision always takes place in the emotional area. The more I can find emotion when I have none, and control them when I have emotions, the more my human relationships are possible.
But your question deals with another area, which includes human relationships, which is how to relate to the higher emotions, and it’s useful to separate that from the first kind. The work with emotions, as understood by the human potential movements and others, can improve my relationships. But it’s only through a relationship with the higher energies that we can really have a stable relationship with humans because that’s the only thing we have in common – higher energies enter me and higher energies enter you. We each have a number of centers but even my essential material of centers is different from yours and all the information depends on being brought up differently and so forth.
How to be able, to be open, to have room enough for this higher energy to enter? That’s what the work is chiefly concerned about. Yes, it’s necessary to be free of the fear because I can’t work without concepts though they can hold up the flow of energy, particularly emotions about concepts, like “I’m right about this concept.” The main this is the higher has to be unknown. I am lower. It is higher. I don’t know it. So there’s probably fear in approaching it.
You call it higher but that’s all you can say. It’s a level where some things take place analogously but I can’t know that except by an observation of myself with that energy. I have to be ready, to prepare myself, to be available to this energy because it’s too convenient when it comes to go away. I have to try to have contact intentionally even though I can’t know. I have to try to let it be received. That’s why we emphasize the somewhat ceremonial aspects of our meetings, even at the expense of it being rather stiff.
It really is useful to study this alone, sitting in the morning. And there again it helps to be rather careful and ceremonial about it. I choose carefully the place I put the cushion. I make sure there’s going to be enough time for how long I want to sit. I don’t sit in bed or in a mess. I get out of bed and tidy the bed. By why speak, you may ask, of such absurd details? It’s a good question.
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.
Lord Pentland: No. I think that what I was trying to say was that it seems as if when I’m in front of you for instance, as if I was doing the very best I could to give my attention to what you’ve said, right? . . But somewhere there’s more attention. Without that I’m not going to really penetrate below the personality, below the prison in which you live and I live. And the conversation will just be superficial. Now what is this more attention I can give to be more present? And I think it requires what I call non-directive skill. I don’t think it’s the least use my trying to impress you. And it’s certainly no use my being afraid of you. So what is this? If you can think of a better word for it, I’d be glad. I think the best word I can find is non-directive skill―an intensely observant state in which I’m taking advantage as little as I do and as much as I can of past experience to try to be present to myself and not be so taken by an impatience to convince you or answer you, but more by a conviction that I could be more present, that I could even be a kind of bearer of some conscious force. I think that’s what’s needed. I think I’m apt to be impatient, to affirm myself by giving an answer, but what’s needed is more attention. It’s very simple, in a way. It’s all there. And people are writing any number of books. I was looking at a book last night in which a man, in a guidebook on meditation, said, “It’s always useful to put on a half smile.” That’s not bad advice in a way. But even that doesn’t always work, you know what I mean? I was talking yesterday to a couple who are having trouble with their marriage. I said to the girl, “You know, a great thing for a woman is to be cheerful.” And she said, “That’s the one thing my husband can’t stand. He says I’m always so cheerful.” . . . Will you think over non-directive skill? Yes?
On the cushion – a simple awareness of my inner world selves. Can I find this simple quiet awareness as I get up and go out into my life? Or will auotmatic functioning take everything?
~Later~
Not so much!
Hope of consciousness is strength
We need a simple awareness to see that our body is a laboratory that contains all our manifestations, all of our selves are there. It is through the body that the law of seven operates; where involution and evolution takes place. The law of three is also there. The physical body will die and all that belongs to the level of the Earth will die.
Intentional manifestations are possible, intentional involution (creation), evolution also, but these require Attention, Consciousness to meet what is in the physical body. This is another force of a different density and frequency of vibration than that of the physical body. But the two can meet and from this meeting a new birth occurs, a miracle.
The law of seven operates within the physical body and either emanates or radiates, dependent upon participation of Consciousness, of Another Attention in the space which it occupies.
Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, G.I. Gurdjieff:
“According to the fantastic branch of this theory of their ‘science,’ now called spiritualism, they suppose among other things that each of them already has a higher being-part or, as they call it, a soul, and that a transmigration must be occurring the whole time to this soul, i.e., something of the kind of this same ‘Okipkhalevnian exchange’ of which I have just spoken. “Of course, if these unfortunates would only take into consideration that according to the second-grade cosmic law called ‘Tenikdoa’ or ‘law of gravity,’ this same being part— if in rare cases it does happen that it arises in them—instantly rises after the first Rascooarno of the being, or, as they express it, after the death of the being, from the surface of their planet; and if they understood that the explanations and proofs, given by this branch of their ‘science,’ of all sorts of phenomena which proceed as it were among them there thanks to those fantastic souls of theirs, were only the fruits of their idle fancy—then they would already realize that everything else proved by this science of theirs is also nothing else but Mullah Nassr Eddin’s ‘twaddle.’
~
And thus, every man, if he is just an ordinary man, that is, one who has never consciously “worked on himself,” has two worlds; and if he has worked on himself, and has become a so to say “candidate for another life,” he has even three worlds. In spite of the fact that everyone, without exception, will certainly think that I have gone completely mad when they read the above statement, I shall nevertheless go on to develop the logical consequences of this ultra-extravagant notion. If you really want to know the truth, I will tell you how matters stand, and why I pronounced such an absurdity. First of all, it must be said that in the outpourings of various occultists and other will-less parasites, when they discuss spiritual questions, not everything is entirely wrong. What they call the “soul” does really exist, but not everybody necessarily has one. A soul is not born with man and can neither unfold nor take form in him so long as his body is not fully developed. It is a luxury that can only appear and attain completion in the period of “responsible age,” that is to say, in a man’s maturity. The soul, like the physical body, is also matter—only, it consists of “finer” matter. The matter from which the soul is formed and from which it later nourishes and perfects itself is, in general, elaborated during the processes that take place between the two essential forces upon which the entire Universe is founded. The matter in which the soul is coated can be produced exclusively by the action of these two forces, which are called “good” and “evil” by ancient science, or “affirmation” and “negation,” while contemporary science calls them “attraction” and “repulsion.” In the common presence of a man, these two forces have their source in two of the totalities of general psychic functioning, which have already been mentioned.
~
… during my studies of the fundamental cosmic laws, I learned that these sacred substances Abrustdonis and Helkdonis are just those substances by which the higher being-bodies of three-brained beings, namely, the body Kesdjan and the body of the Soul, are in general formed and perfected; and when I learned that the separation of the sacred Askokin from the said sacred substances proceeds in general when the beings on whatever planet it might be transubstantiate the sacred substances Abrustdonis and Helkdonis in themselves for the forming and perfecting of their higher bodies, by means of conscious labors and intentional sufferings.
View From the Real World, Gurdjieff’s Talks
Gurdjieff: A soul is a luxury. No one has yet been born with a fully developed soul. Before we can speak of reincarnation, we must know what kind of man we are speaking about, what kind of soul and what kind of reincarnation. A soul may disintegrate immediately after death, or it may do so after a certain time. For example, a soul may be crystallized within the limits of the earth and may remain there, yet not be crystallized for the sun.
There is no master in ordinary man. And if there is no master, there is no soul.
A soul—this is the aim of all religions, of all schools. It is only an aim, a possibility; it is not a fact.
Ordinary man has no soul and no will. What is usually called will is merely the resultant of desires. If a man has a desire and at the same time there arises a contrary desire, that is, an unwillingness of greater strength than the first, the second will check the first and extinguish it. This is what in ordinary language is called will.
A child is never born with a soul. A soul can be acquired only in the course of life. Even then it is a great luxury and only for a few. Most people live all their lives without a soul, without a master, and for ordinary life a soul is quite unnecessary.
But a soul cannot be born from nothing. Everything is material and so is the soul, only it consists of very fine matter. Consequently, in order to acquire a soul, it is first of all necessary to have the corresponding matter. Yet we do not have enough materials even for our everyday functions.
The work of a man who wishes to awaken is excruciatingly difficult. The attention wanders, drifts towards a thought, a physical posture, an emotion. The work is to stay awake to myself; to observe my inner world, to resist the pull, to be vigilant. How to awaken the body, the intellectual function, and feeling? How is it that we can struggle to not be taken?
Exchanges Within, John Pentland
Until my attention is divided, there is no work. You understand that now. As long as I’m – whatever we call it – in my ego, as long as I think that just following one idea or applying one idea to myself is work, is practice, if you like, nothing can come. Now, very often that is how I begin to work. And then at a certain point the attention divides. Who divides it? It isn’t clear to you yet, that at a certain point I feel a relaxation, you know. You understand?
I begin to be aware of a current, a movement of relaxation. Yes? Now do you suddenly switch to putting all your attention on the relaxation? That wouldn’t be consciousness. To be aware, part of it remains, part of the tension attracts my attention. Partly the tension attracts my attention and partly I feel myself relaxing. Do you understand?
So the attention has suddenly divided. Yes? Well ten of course I can really say I’m between; it’s not a thought then. That’s not something of an image or something; the attention is divided. It’s very insecure. You know? It’s so brief, it’s so insecure I can hardly say that I experience it. Then I experience it again, maybe. Maybe another moment of relaxation, where partly the attention is taken by this current towards relaxation, towards going down in myself, but some of the attention remains behind on the tension. And so, again, for a moment I’m between. Do you understand?
Reality of Being, Jeanne de Salzmann
In my usual state, my attention is not voluntary. It is of low quality, without power, and flows passively toward the outside. But this attention has the possibility of being transformed, of achieving a purer quality by maintaining a direction recognized as necessary. By the force of my attention actively turned inward, the movement of energy changes.. Instead of going outside, it concentrates within until it forms the center of gravity of my Presence. My whole effort, my whole work, is to maintain this direction – to maintain a body so relaxed that the energy does not leave, a thinking turned toward myself so vigilant that its very presence sustains the stillness of my body, and a feeling of what wants to be recognized, of what is here, a feeling of “I.” It is an effort of attention coming from all the parts of myself – to purify the attention in order to concentrate on “I.” In this effort I discover a way of functioning that is no longer passive, a work in which the functions are called to obey the movement of attention.
