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Fourth Way Student

@_gurdjieff_

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Selected excerpts from Fourth Way teachers

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“We need to experience something big, like having our house set on fire, in order to struggle with our identifications, which make sure that we do not produce higher hydrogens. First we need to know where these identifications lie, and how they keep our feet securely nailed to the second state of consciousness (waking sleep). Seeing our situation will help us to produce the first conscious shock. The first conscious shock will free us from the lower triangle of Solomon’s Seal. It will teach us not to rely solely on Hydrogen 48. This will slowly lead us to use the higher parts of our centers and will bring a higher intelligence, an intelligence that will see reality in a different light. For this reason it is very important to apply Work ideas to our Being. If you are dominated by negativity you will never be able to reach Hydrogen 24. This higher thinking is a free pondering. It is not based on keeping up appearances, or on a need to look smart. This intelligence can work only when we are in the inner parts of the centers. It takes Self-Remembering, along with courage and determination, for us to take this Work truly seriously.”
~ Ocke de Boer (Two Souls)
Art: #AntonioCanova by @_gurdjieff_

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5 months ago

“Whatever Objective Art is, one of its chief aims must be to help us to remember ourselves, to remind us of our forgotten Divine nature. BEELZEBUB’S TALES TO HIS GRANDSON does precisely that and it does it with the vision of the Whole within a whole because only in understanding the whole can we understand and accept the part. It reminds us of our higher Divine part and that we are beings created in the image of God: but it also reminds us of our lower nature and the condition of our fall and exile far from the Center. It reminds us that Objective Divine Reason is the highest we can attain; but it also reminds us of our everyday ordinary automated reason. It reminds us of the laws of World-creation and World-maintenance and the need to understand them if we wish to rediscover our Divine part; but it also reminds us of the inescapable nature of these laws and our bondage to them. It reminds us of the individual efforts that we have to undertake to escape from exile and return to the Center; but it also reminds us that only by putting ourselves in the position of the other can we return to the Center. It reminds us of that great cosmic calamity, the “Choot-God-Litanical” period; but it also reminds us of our little calamities in any café of the city of our planet. It reminds us of the funny side to the things of life. It reminds us of our greatness as three-brained beings of the Universe; but it also reminds us of our nothingness and mortality. It reminds us of the All Universal Sorrow of our COMMON FATHER; but it also reminds us of His Compassion for three-brained beings of the planet Earth. It reminds us that by acquiring Conscience we can participate in the Divine Plan; but it also reminds us of the Hasnamusses, those individual beings who opt not to participate in the Plan. It reminds us of the Great Messengers sent from Above to help with the Plan; but it also reminds us of the ordinary idiots down here who also work for the Plan. It contains, to quote the author from his book, “all that exists, all that existed, all that can exist. The beginning, the end, all the secrets of the creation of the world; all is there.”
~ Will Mesa (Stopinder Anthology Vol.1) by @_gurdjieff_

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6 months ago

“All of terrestrial nature exists thanks to the descent on the macrocosmic scale of the higher into the lower. But at the uniquely human level, this penetration and influence can take place only through a conscious intent on the part of man. The contact between levels for which man must be the active agent is necessary both for the evolution of his own inner nature and for his outer behavior and “emanation” vis-à-vis terrestrial nature. In Gurdjieff’s teaching, therefore, the grasping of the universal in the particular is not a mere mental process, but a voluntary act of opening to a fine energy of consciousness of a more universal order, permitting this conscious energy to enter into the lower and more localized (particular) level of terrestrial nature. The earth needs man’s understanding, not only in relation to man’s proper actions, but also as a cosmic event in its own right, comparable to the reception by the earth of the light of the sun.”
~ Jacob Needleman (The Indestructible Question)
Artist Unknown by @_gurdjieff_

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6 months ago

“There are a thousand things which prevent a man from awakening which keep him in the power of his dreams. In order to act consciously with the intention of awakening, it is necessary to know the nature of the forces which keep man in a state of sleep.’”
“First of all it must be realized that the sleep in which man exists is not normal but hypnotic sleep. Man is hypnotized and this hypnotic state is continuously maintained and strengthened in him. One would think that there are forces for whom it is useful and profitable to keep man in a hypnotic state and prevent him from seeing the truth and understanding his position.”
~ Gurdjieff in P.D. Ouspensky (In Search of the Miraculous) by @_gurdjieff_

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6 months ago

“The general psyche of man in its definitive form is considered to be the result of conformity to these three independent worlds. The first is the outer world—in other words, everything existing outside him, both what he can see and feel as well as what is invisible and intangible for him. The second is the inner world—in other words, all the automatic processes of his nature and the mechanical repercussions of these processes. The third world is his own world, depending neither upon his “outer world” nor upon his “inner world”; that is to say, it is independent of the caprices of the processes that flow in him as well as of the imperfections in these processes that bring them about. A man who does not possess his own world can never do anything from his own initiative: all his actions “are done” in him. Only he can have his own initiative for perceptions and manifestations in whose common presence there has been formed, in an independent and intentional manner, the totality of factors necessary for the functioning of this third world.”
~ G.I. Gurdjieff, Life is Only Real Then, When “I Am”
Art: Gustavi Seleni Cryptomenytices Et Cryptographiae Libri Ix c. 1624 by @_gurdjieff_

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7 months ago

“Before you can help others, be of real use to others, you must know yourself and be able to help yourself. Now you are egoist, mind always on yourself. You must learn how to be egoist for good aim, then you will be able to be real altruist and help others.”
~ Gurdjieff in C.S. Nott, Teachings of Gurdjieff
Art: @tuukzs by @_gurdjieff_

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7 months ago

“A real worker cannot allow himself to become a spiritual aristocrat. He must first prepare, and then be ready to question himself and the quality of his wish to work, over and over again.
The depths of self observation can be measured by your ability to be sincere.
The only thing that can break down buffers is sincerity.
Try to see the buffer from two sides. It can bring you to sleep or you could wake up in the recognition of it.
That which sees and doesn’t comment can use a weakness as a vehicle to penetrate more deeply into the situation I’m in. Silence is such an informer.
You will be stronger each time you stand in front of your weaknesses without identifying with them. This is a law that nothing can change.
The more difficult the situation, the larger the contrast between mechanicalness and peace inside.
If you stick to the work, also in difficult times, it is guaranteed that you will come out the other side differently than you had imagined. Remember the saying, “It is when it is getting steep that you are moving upwards.”
~ Terje Toone, The Gurdjieff Puzzle Now by @_gurdjieff_

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8 months ago

“Gurdjieff uses several images to make us realize the situation in which we are. “We are living”, he says, “in a house that is our legitimate heritage. But of this house we only know and inhabit the smallest and poorest room and do not even suspect that there are more rooms, each of which is incomparably richer in accommodation and view than the preceding one.”
On another occasion he says that we are living in a prison. We do not realize this and still less suspect that outside the prison there are people living free, whose highest aim it is to do all that is possible to help us escape.
Also he compares our situation to slavery. “One thing is certain”, he says, “that man’s slavery grows and increases. Man is becoming a willing slave. He no longer needs chains. He begins to grow fond of his slavery, to be proud of it. And this is the most terrible thing that can happen to a man.”
One of the basic ideas to which Gurdjieff comes back again and again relates to the mechanicalness of our manifestations. It is an illusion that we, as we are, are able to do. Real doing requires an altogether different level of being than the one at which we ordinarily live. With us the situation is that, as we are, our thinking, feeling and acting are almost entirely determined by external influences, that ‘it’ thinks and ‘it’ feels and everything ‘happens’ with us, in exactly the same way as ‘it’ rains or ‘it’ freezes.”
~ Martin Ekker (Gurdjieff: The Man and His Work)
Art: Rajasthan School 18c. by @_gurdjieff_

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8 months ago

“The human organism”, says Gurdjieff “represents a chemical factory planned for the possibility of a very large output. But in the ordinary conditions of life the output of this factory never reaches the full production possible to it, because only a small part of the machinery is used, which produces only that quantity of material necessary to maintain its own existence. Factory work of this kind is obviously uneconomic in the highest degree. The factory actually produces nothing – all its machinery, all its elaborate equipment, actually serve no purpose at all, in that it maintains only with difficulty its own existence.”
The raw materials with which the factory of our organism works, are the food we eat and drink, the air we breathe, the impressions we receive. With the help of an interesting diagram Gurdjieff indicated how these three kinds of raw materials are refined in our organism and transformed into the finer matters or more potent energies that are required for the functioning of our different (higher) centers.
However, there is something wrong. On the one hand, the production of the higher energies remains much below what it should be, and on the other the far greater part of our energy is quite uselessly poured away. “Energy”, Gurdjieff says, “is spent chiefly on unnecessary and unpleasant emotions, on the expectation of unpleasant things, possible and impossible, on bad moods, on unnecessary haste, nervousness, irritability, day-dreaming, and so on. Energy is wasted on the wrong work of centers; on unnecessary tensions of the muscles out of all proportion to the work produced; on perpetual chatter which absorbs an enormous amount of energy; on the ‘interest’ continually taken in things happening around us or to other people and having in fact no interest whatever; on the constant waste of the force of ‘attention’; and so on, and so on.”
~ Martin Ekker (Gurdjieff: The Man and His Work)
Artist Unknown by @_gurdjieff_

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8 months ago

“(Paraphrasing Gurdjieff) All existing emotions, all feelings, had purpose; there was a reason for their existence and a proper use for each one of them. But without consciousness or knowledge we use them blindly, compulsively and ignorantly, without any sort of control, producing the same effect in our emotional life as would have been produced, musically, by playing a pipe-organ as an animal might play it... simply at random.”
~ Fritz Peters (Boyhood with Gurdjieff)
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“One must take the emotions that come to one—of wonder, of thankfulness, love of beauty—and bring out of them a strengthening of one’s wish to work... If one does not convert the experience of the rejoicing into a wish to be worthy of it then it is wasted... When we used to listen to Gurdjieff playing the little hand organ, somehow he produced in me—and many others felt the same—a longing to purify myself, far stronger than anything I could summon up. I just wanted to be right, to be what I should be.”
~ J.G. Bennett (Talks on Beelzebub’s Tales)
Art: #PaulLaffoley by @_gurdjieff_

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10 months ago

“‘You have dogs within you, you must become their master. If you find the animal that is within you, you can understand it. It is not a matter of scolding the animal, it is part of you. You must get to know its nature: it barks, it attacks; but if you understand it, and love it, it will be pleased to serve you, it will not have to be on the defensive, because it will feel loved and it will love you.’”
~ #Gurdjieff, in Solange Claustres, Becoming Conscious with G. I. Gurdjieff
Art: Alchemisch-medizinisches Hausbuch des Pfarrers Valentinus aus Ottrau, 1529c. by @_gurdjieff_

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10 months ago

“Gurdjieff taught that man is a three-brained being. The moving-instinctive-sex brain, or centre, exists in the body from the back of the head, down the spinal chord, to the coccyx. The emotional brain has its centre in the solar plexus and extends throughout the body. The intellectual brain is in the head. There is a subsidiary brain called the formatory apparatus, with which most people do their thinking, which is situated in the frontal part of the head. The subconscious mind, which contains the entire history of mankind and is in touch with the Earth’s mind, is almost inaccessible to unconscious man but can be contacted by special methods.
The centres can attain various degrees of development and a person may be an infant, child, adolescent or man in any of his centres. Thus, a foolish person could be an infant in all three centres, and if he had no magnetic centre would probably become insane. A man who works well with his hands, such as a carpenter or engineer, may be adolescent in the moving centre but infant in the other two, therefore there would be no balance. There can be any number of combinations of centres but each person is born with one centre dominant, which governs his type. The aim should be to become a man in the three centres, but very few people do it on this Earth.”
~ Abdullah Dougan (Probings)
Art taken from Kathleen Speeth’s “The Gurdjieff Work” by @_gurdjieff_

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a year ago