Source Text
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.
“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.
AI Summary
American Book of the Dead by John C. Lilly, E. J. Gold, and Claudio Naranjo presents key insights from the Gurdjieff tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
This entry was generated from Readwise highlights. Expand with additional context as appropriate.