(The Gurdjieff method and how to receive its teaching)
Gurdjieff’s strategy of holding the carrot before the reader’s eyes, from page to page and chapter to chapter, forever promising the delivery of some esoteric secret and acting on his mind along the way in a completely different manner than expected, and through seemingly irrelevant material.
It is as if he wanted to create a barrier through such vulgar form—a barrier only negotiable to those who can receive a spiritual message without the need of “spiritual” language.
This condition of essential self was called in Zen the attainment of “no mind,” which means “no mind, but plenty of attention, and interest without hunger and desire.”
It should be a relief to know that no matter what happens, there is a reader out there somewhere who has the sensitivity and integrity to deliver labyrinth instructions at the precise point at which they are needed and not a moment before, and that no matter how far from the human dimension we may wander, help is always available at extreme need, the operant words being “need” and “extreme.”
- Read the instructions as if you had just thought of them. If you find a word that isn’t your own—that is, you don’t know what it means—get it defined before going any further. Don’t, under any circumstances, substitute your own words for the words of the text when doing a reading. Just find out what the words in the text mean. Use a dictionary if necessary. If you must ad-lib, do it on your own time.
Get into the habit of doing the readings every morning and every evening at exactly the same time; say, six o’clock in the morning, and six in the evening. Then after a week of doing this, don’t do it one evening. Notice a definite feeling of unused energy? That’s why we do readings at the same time each day.
(The macrodimensions and the nature of the essential self)
“What does he do when he’s alone?” “I don’t know…I’ve never been with him when he’s alone.”
are very capable of creating for ourselves a protective mechanism, a semblance of ordinary, familiar reality to disguise what’s really happening. Now you have a good reason to read with attention, as if someone’s very being depended on it. It might be your own.
Without continuous well-reinforced visualization training, the labyrinthine macrodimensions tend to masquerade as ordinary life. Guides appear but we explain them to ourselves as simple changes of light playing tricks on the vision; the sweeping tonal harmonics of macrodimensional sounds we translate to common understandable phenomena—horns of passing traffic, airplanes, music—orchestral, choral, heavily metallic. The mind transforms labyrinth phenomena into ordinary phenomena of the present consciousness. Remember that the nature of the phenomenal world—the lower dimensions—is phenomena. All the phenomena of the “organic” world—the human dimension—as well as the labyrinth with its macrodimensions are controlled by the being-attention, because higher mind controls itself—unlike lower mind which is controlled by the environment. But unfortunately, the awareness of an individual generally doesn’t include awareness of, or control over, the mind.
You might now see the sense of treating everyone and everything as a manifestation of God, as the mystics have said for centuries, including your own essential self, that selfness which resides deeply beyond ego, consciousness and action, none of which are actually “yours” or ever were “yours” in the sense of ownership but belong entirely to the world. You—the real you—exist solely as a source of attention and presence, beyond all action and involvement with the turbulent flow of biological life—itself just a secondary manifestation of localized field-effect probability and indeterminacy—all around you.
To be on the safe side, always assume that you are presently in the macrodimensional domains and that your perceptions and assumptions about yourself and your environment, especially if they seem to conform to the standard human primate world-view, are completely wrong.
Type one meditation is designed to help you discover your essential self—to dig down past all the things you now identify as your self, and keep on digging down until you find the Self-Without-Qualities—this is sometimes called the “Not That, Not That, Not That … “ meditation. You should be able to correctly identify the void-without-qualities or Clear Light as your deepest, most real self. Many techniques exist to do this—it’s by far the most popular, since it goes right out the top.
Thanks to the space-age technology of reading aloud, we now have the means to metaprogram the essential self against negative rebirths.
The real problem of primate existence is to train not the mind, but the essential self, the voyager, whose presence and attention survive after all ordinary forms and manifestations of consciousness have fragmented into their five basic and, to the primate mind, totally unrecognizable, components; this is roughly equivalent to a cowboy who has never been exposed to anything but duck-art and black velvet bar paintings of nude Mexican women suddenly coming face-to-face with a signed original Picasso at his most Cubist.
(Moving through the labyrinth: disorientation, realities, and the dream of existence)
drama. I now realize with a sudden clarity of understanding that there is no sequence of events making up the time track and that the apparency of time is simply a random connection of pictures and sounds associated by significance to each other which only makes sense during the dream of life. I have almost awakened from the dream of existence, but the real awakening is still far before me.
The only truth I can hear now and accept is the truth that agrees with my present understanding, which is that they know and I don’t and that this will never end. I begin to feel a rising panic, because I don’t want to be alone, but on the other hand, I don’t want to be with them.
“Real is anything you bump into,” She informs me. But I know that there are an almost infinite number of realities, “wheels within wheels within wheels,” all spinning inside each other in endless games within games within games. I am sure now that I will never know for certain whether I have really awakened to reality or whether it’s just another dream.
Actually my consciousness and my beingness are always the same. Change continues only so long as I am connected with planetary existence on the six realms of experience. If I would only awaken, I could have planetary connection without sleep and experience.
(Navigating the radiations: fear, anger, and the pull toward rebirth)
Every thought of fear, terror or awe aroused by the visions in the labyrinth is caused within myself, because I have become identified with my own visions, lost in the swirling patterns of my own thought-forms; at this all-important moment of liberation, I do not become caught up in the power of my own hallucinations.
This knowledge that anger is a reaction to fear gives me strength to liberate myself from rising panic; I need not protect myself from humiliation; with this understanding, I am able to allow the brilliant white cleansing radiation to dissolve every last shred of anger and hatred accumulated from contamination with the life of the human biological machine.
If I give myself over to the dark side, I am destined to endure unbearable torture, pain and misery, with little hope of liberation; without resistance, I will not allow myself to be drawn down into lovemaking by the soft, seductive smoky light which is the collective force of fear and anger; I collect my attention and bathe myself in the brilliant, dazzling white radiation; holding my attention rooted upon the white radiation, I form and concentrate my thoughts in this way:
If I concentrate my attention in thisway, with humility and faith, I will merge into the rainbow light of the heart of the Sun-Absolute and attain to complete union in supreme blissful happiness.
The primal form of the element Earth is going to shine outward like a yellow radiantbeam. At the same time, the yellow aura of the Great Mother, absorbed in the total meditation of zero interest, zero attention and zero information, descends upon the beloved, altering the visage and mood.
I may be inclined to escape its presence, to try to get out of the way, to run, to hide somewhere to avoid it. The soft blue light of the human dimension will seem like an attractive and safe place to hide compared to the immediate threat of the powerful yellow radiation, but I must not be afraid of the dazzling yellow light but let it hit and strip me of ego. I will know it to be wisdom; keeping resolvedto trust in it earnestly and with humility. As long as I recognize it to be the radiation of my own essential self, I still need to make efforts to be humble. If I can focus my attention on the radiant face of the beloved and allow the harsh yellow radiation to do its dissolving work, I will find myself merging inseparably with the Voidness of the Void, and will in that way attain some measure ofeternal liberation.
The radiation emanating from the beloved is the grace of the guide of the macrodimensions; I will takerefuge in it. It is the purifying force which dissolves my attraction to the lower dimensions; by this dissolving radiation I can remain free from the compelling power of human life to which I am drawn by long-established habit; I must have faith in the cleansing radiation and accept its help.
My path is now strongly set for rebirth, and I feel driven by a powerful wind behind me. That’s the wind of karmic desires, inclinations and tendencies and is nothing but my own attractions and repulsions about existence. It all seems so ordinary and familiar, like some eternal “déjà vu,” and yet at the same moment somehow unutterably alien, unpredictable and strange. I will imagine that I am being hunted like a wounded animal, and I’ll hear sounds of “Get him!” and “Kill the sonofabitch!” I won’t be afraid of that; it’s just my own paranoia that those against whom I committed what I consider to be negative acts will take their revenge on me while I’m vulnerable. I feel disaster. Visions of earthquakes, floods, fires, or the explosion of hydrogen bombs assail me, yet I know that these anxieties are nothing more than the automatic results of my organic habits imposed upon me during my previous exposures to organic life, producing what are still extremely powerful and active reverberations of aggression, passion and ignorance within my partially re-formed consciousness.
(Dissolution of self and the final teaching on liberation)
Even the essential self itself, the void of the void, is nonexistent in reality, and has been nonexistent from the very beginning. Even this voice, this teaching and the necessity for it are nonexistent. There never was nor will there ever be a world, nor have there ever been or ever will be six lower dimensions of inhabitants in which to be born. I have been walking in a dream, dreaming as if there were a dream, resisting as if there were something to resist, but now I resist no longer as there is no other: no karma, no self, no void, no wombs, no male, no female, no birth, no death, no labyrinth, no reality, no unreality. Onlymy own endless endlessness remaining with no beginning and no end. Now it is finished, and I am done with my desire, aggression, resistance, attractions, thoughts, experience. I am ready now to be what I am. I am that I am. There is no other. By concentrating all my thoughts and beingness on this and allowing no other belief to enter into my consciousness, the reality of thewomb and the fight to resist rebirth are destroyed. When the belief in a centralized self is destroyed there is nothing to be reborn. If I am willing to renounce all experience, not only with the thoughts and heart but also from the being, then all womb doors will certainly be closed and there will be no rebirth.
This teaching is so profound that it can lead even the most evil and degraded being onto the secret path. Practice during the lifetime of letting go of attachments, passions and aggressions while under stress and extreme pressure will be better than meditations in a serene outer world environment, because only if one is able to remain serene in his being while being lashed with rawhide whips and devoured by dogs while hearing hard rock music at three thousand decibels will this instruction certainly bring about liberation at the moment before death. One must remember this teaching even if he forgets his own grandmother. There is no other teaching. This is it.
But after awakening you won’t mind being anywhere or nowhere. Liberation makes the dream a whole lot better, and gives relief from suffering. But real awakening is simply waking up from the dream and letting the dream go on with you or without you. When you no longer want to manipulate the dream and make it better, you’ll be willing to wake up. And when you wake up, you wake up.
‘Cosmic Love is absolutely ruthless and highly indifferent: it teaches its lessons whether you like/dislike them or not.’ “